KRISTIN DICKERSON

Female Transplant Surgeon Inspires

It’s home to hundreds of transplant surgeries every year; and for the last five years, Baylor Scott and White has also been home to Dr. Tiffany Anthony, who’s scrubbing in for life saving surgery.

“You take a person who’s close to death, you do the liver transplant and within a week [and even sooner] they’re up walking around,” Anthony said.

The hospital provided footage of Anthony doing a kidney transplant. For living donors she uses a robot, “and then with two fingers I move—and my wrists—I move the instruments and the camera. So, ya, it’s pretty cool. It’s pretty cool,” Anthony said with a laugh.

Her love for this industry was sparked in college while working as an orderly in an operating room.

“You know, it was the first time I’d seen the human heart or the inside of an abdomen, and I walked away after that first week of work saying ‘this is what I want to do,’” Anthony said.

She has now performed thousands of transplant operations during her career, including one that involved a viral video.

“I look so much better now that I have part of Graham McMillan in me,” Danny Kolzow said to his friend McMillan last summer after their kidney transplant.

The video of McMillan surprising his friend Kolzow at work and offering him a kidney spread quickly online. NBC 5 covered their story in July of 2016.

“Like there is no greater love, I don’t think, that you could show someone on this earth than saying you are worth me going through this pain so that you could have more life,” Kolzow said after Anthony performed their successful transplant.

“Just for his friend to look at him and say, ‘I can do something for you,’ it’s a really selfless act to donate an organ,” Anthony said.

And to be the woman in charge of that surgery is rare.

Anthony is one of only 100 female transplant surgeons in the world. She hopes that her example proves to little girls everywhere that any career is possible.

“I hope that we just talk to little girls the same way we talk to little boys, and that they know from when they’re small that there really is not a path in life that they shouldn’t take if they want it,” Anthony said.

Contact Us