Surgeon shares heartwarming tweet after seeing ‘unrecognisable’ former patient

Dr Dinee Simpson’s tweet went viral after she shared uplifting interaction she had with former liver transplant patient

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A transplant surgeon went viral on Twitter after she shared the uplifting interaction she had with a former patient.

Dr Dinee Simpson is a surgeon who specialises in liver and kidney transplants at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, Illinois. After recently running into a former patient when she stopped for coffee, Simpson shared the exchange on Twitter.

“Having a bad morning, stopped for coffee,” her tweet began. “Woman next to me stared at my ID badge and started to cry. I did her liver transplant last year, she was so sick then.”

“Today she had her hair did, makeup on, and looked FABULOUS,” Simpson added. “Unrecognisable. Gave me the BEST hug.”

She added: “I love this job”.

The tweet, which was posted on 8 March, gained more than 270,000 likes and 14,000 retweets. Social media users thanked Dr Simpson for sharing the story and offered their own experiences with surgery recoveries.

“What a nice way to end a bad morning,” responded one user. “You do realise you’re a hero, right? Your skill, caring, expertise made that woman whole again. She was probably scared prior to surgery & you saved her. I don’t know her, or you Dr, but I know valour and caring when I see it - that would be you”.

“As the mom of a wonderful son who became an organ donor after he was killed by a drunk driver, I’d like to thank you, too,” tweeted someone else. “Knowing my son’s organs are helping others makes it all a little more bearable.”

Another person responded: “I love how you said ‘I did her liver transplant last year’ like you painted her nails. So humble. A hero.”

“Best part of my job is not recognising my patients post-transplant because they look so much healthier,” shared one Twitter user.

Speaking to The Independent, Dr Simpson described the initial moment she recognised her former patient as “a mix of emotions”. At first, she panicked when she couldn’t place the woman in the coffee shop and asked for her name. When she learned her name, the memories came flooding back. “That’s just the best feeling because you have these memories that are kind of burned into my brain about how ill this patient looked when they went to the operating room,” Dr Simpson told us.

“It was a fantastic feeling to see her,” she said. “And it really changed my entire day.”

After sharing her interaction with the former patient, Dr Simpson was overwhelmed by the response her tweet received. When she finished performing surgery that day, a nurse informed her that her phone had been buzzing with notifications during the transplant. “I looked at Twitter, and it was more tweets than I had ever seen,” she said. “I was flabbergasted at that point in time, and then I watched it grow. I was just amazed, and I remained amazed.”

With many negative messages inundating social media, Dr Simpson believes that it was refreshing for people to hear something really positive.

“Wow. I did not expect this response, but makes me realise how we all need so badly to hear/see/experience more positivity in our lives,” she tweeted. “Blessings to all”.

Dr Simpson, who is the first Black female transplant surgeon in Illinois, is also the founder of The Northwestern Medicine African American Transplant Access Program. Apart from being a transplant surgeon, Dr Simpson also advocates for transplant care in the African American community by improving access to education, resources, and world-class transplant care, according to Northwestern Medicine.

“We built this program that helps mitigate barriers to accessing transplantation,” Dr Simpson said. “Whether it’s community conversations to raise awareness about transplant as an option, to working with them around the structural barriers that they may face around transportation and insurance and accessibility, to rebuilding trust because there’s a lot of distrust of the medical community and that is often a barrier to transplant as well.”

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, over 40,000 organ transplants were performed in the United States last year, with more than half being kidney transplants. The number of organ donors also increased by ten per cent since 2020. For Dr Simpson, the greatest outcome from her tweet going viral was that it allowed others to offer their own experiences with transplantation and organ donation. “It was a simple tweet that shared my uplifting experience that turned into many people sharing their uplifting experiences and uplifting each other,” she said. “I thought that that was amazing.”