09/11/2026
🤍 9/11/2001. After every flight was grounded, only a few were allowed to fly this day. This is the story of the liver that was flown from Nashville to Houston for a six month old baby with hours to live. It was delivered to Texas Children’s, where Luca’s transplant surgeon, Dr. John Goss, received it. 25 years later, we celebrated Dr. Goss‘s 3,000th transplant and met the mother of that young special girl who is alive and well today. 
A newborn died in Nashville overnight on September 10, 2001. His family, in the worst hours of their lives, decided to donate his organs. Only the liver could be used.
Early the next morning a match came back: a 6-month-old girl in Houston named Kareena, dying of liver failure. A charter plane was booked and the recovery surgery at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital was nearly finished. Then the country closed.
Jill Grandas ran Tennessee Donor Services. Her phone rang, and it was her own staff member standing in the operating room. "What are we going to do? No planes are allowed to leave the ground."
There was a liver in a cooler with hours left on it, a baby in Texas who did not have longer, and not one civilian aircraft in America was permitted to move. So Grandas reached for the phone book.
"Believe it or not, 20 years ago in the blue pages, there was a listing for the tower," she said.
Somebody at Nashville International picked up, handed her to a supervisor, and the supervisor's calls reached Senator Bill Frist, a transplant surgeon before he was a politician, who did not need the situation explained to him. The Tennessee Air National Guard was cleared to fly.
They started up a C-130 Hercules, an aircraft built to carry a tank, and put 10 ounces in it.
"We usually take some pretty interesting things in the back of a C-130," co-pilot John Howard said. "And that was probably the lightest payload, next to being empty, that I've ever flown in my life."
Nobody spoke for the first half of the flight. The sky was empty and patrolled by fighters, and the crew understood what could happen to an aircraft that appeared where it should not be. They landed in Houston and handed the cooler over without shutting down the engines.
Dr. John Goss was waiting at Texas Children's Hospital. The transplant went smoothly.
Kareena is 25 now. "All these people who didn't know this little baby, who had no connection with this child, worked together on a day that really tested our nation," she said.
This week, 25 years later, she finally met Jill Grandas in person.
