Fox News Channel’s chief national correspondent Ed Henry, 47, announced Sunday morning that he would be taking a medical leave of absence from the network to donate a part of his liver to his sister.
Henry’s sister, Colleen, has been suffering from a hereditary degenerative liver disease. A GoFundMe has been set up to help her family offset the medical costs of the procedure, to which Henry linked in a tweet.
Fundraiser by Justin Wilson : Support Colleen Henry’s Liver Transplant Recovery https://t.co/8ey0G5op4D
— Ed Henry (@edhenry) July 7, 2019
“It is my sincere hope that talking about this journey for myself and Colleen, who has been bravely battling degenerative liver disease over the last few years, will help bring some awareness for the over 113,000 people waiting at this time for lifesaving organs (about 13,000 of whom need a healthy liver),” Henry wrote in an op-ed for Fox News.
“On Tuesday I will be donating approximately 30 percent of my liver to my sister at a hospital in the Northeast,” he continued. “I will undergo about six hours of surgery to remove that portion of my liver, and in an operating room next door Colleen will go through about eight to 10 hours of surgery to entirely remove her diseased liver and replace it with part of my liver.”
Henry got emotional while discussing the upcoming operation on Fox & Friends Sunday. The hosts also interviewed a doctor who is not familiar with Henry’s case specifically, but discussed organ transplants.
In the procedure Henry will be doing, 30% of the donor’s liver is removed and given to the recipient, whose diseased liver is removed. Because of the organ’s regenerative qualities, the missing parts of the liver in both donor and recipient regrow, if all goes well. Chronic rejection of the donated liver occurs in around 5% of patients.
A native New Yorker, Henry covered Capitol Hill as a print journalist for Roll Call for nearly a decade. He moved to CNN, where he covered the White House from 2004 to 2011 before going to Fox News. He also served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association from 2012 to 2013.
He married CNN senior producer Shirley Hung in 2010, and has two children.
