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A RECALCITRANT drug addict, she has made headlines in Australia due to the controversies surrounding her need to get a second liver transplant.
But 24-year-old Australian Claire Murray is now in Singapore, ready to make news again as the first person here to undergo a second liver transplant.
According to Australian press reports, Ms Murray, a single mother of two, suffered liver damage after 12 years of abusing heroin and amphetamines.
Late last year, she received her first liver transplant in Perth, Western Australia. It was a cadaveric transplant, which means that the liver came from a dead person.
But soon after, she started taking drugs again, causing her new liver to fail.
Doctors in Perth told her that she would die within months if she did not get a second liver transplant operation.
But she was refused a place on the waiting list for a donor organ in Western Australia (WA).
WA Health Minister Kim Hames was reported to have said that there are seven other people in WA who are waiting for their first liver transplant.
The Transplant Society of Australia and New Zealand website says that patients won't get on the waiting list if they have persistent alcohol or substance abuse problems.
Australian online newspaper PerthNow reported that Dr Hames said it would be "patently unfair" for Ms Murray to jump the queue for a second cadaveric liver.
Last month, Dr Hames said the state government was prepared to pay for her and her father to travel to New Zealand so she could be considered for a living donor liver transplant (LDLT) there.
Such a procedure is not available in Australia. It involves taking about a third of the liver from a willing donor and transplanting it into the patient.
By this month, the decision was made to come to Singapore to have the surgery.
Sources told The New Paper that Ms Murray has been here for about a week, undergoing tests at Mount Elizabeth Hospital.
It is understood that the hospital's ethics committee has approved the surgery. Her donor is understood to be her mother, Valerie.
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