Twins Need New Livers To Survive; Only One Got Transplant In Time

SLIDELL, LA — When Nick Coats called his mom from school saying his hamstring burned so bad he could barely sit at his desk, she thought nothing of it. Nick, a high schooler from Slidell, and his identical twin brother, Devin, had grown like crazy, approaching 6 feet, so it was probably just growing pains, she reasoned.

That was more than a year ago. On Monday, the Coats family sat quietly on their back porch and listened to the Christian song "Home" by Chris Tomlin. They knew the worst was coming.

Nick died that night.

What the family didn't know at the time he complained of hamstring pain, was that both Nick and his twin brother were suffering from "cirrhosis of the liver" caused by a genetic mutation. According to the Mayo Clinic, cirrhosis is a late stage of scarring of the liver. The liver detoxifies harmful substances, cleans blood and produces vital nutrients, and cirrhosis happens in response to liver damage.

"Each time your liver is injured, it tries to repair itself," the nonprofit medical practice and research group says on its website. "In the process, scar tissue forms. As cirrhosis progresses, more and more scar tissue forms, making it difficult for the liver to function."

But the twins' cirrhosis wasn't the result of the usual factors, according to a GoFundMe post created to raise money for transplant costs.

"This is strictly from a mutated gene found in the boy's DNA during its splitting, and somehow this gene is believed to have caused several symptoms and issues, and we are still trying to figure it out with the help of a genetics doctor," the post said.

Nick was diagnosed with liver disease in March 2017, but his so called-MELD score, or Model for End-Stage Liver Disease, was 13, so he didn't qualify for the organ donor registry at that point, the family said in a Facebook post on Monday. The Mayo Clinic says the score measures a patient's risk of death with end-stage liver disease. It's used as a disease severity index to help identify who is most in need of an organ transplant.

Nick waited for months for his condition to worsen in order to get on the donor list until in August, he was diagnosed with liver cancer — a very aggressive type known as angiosarcoma.

"If my son didn't have to wait due to the lack of liver donors nationwide, he would've been transplanted before time allowed the liver cancer to develop as well," the Facebook post on Monday said. "Don't let this be your son, daughter, mother, father, sister, brother, cousin or even friend because you know something? As I type this, I'm laying in my son's bed watching him slowly slip away with his hand in mine, with my heart pounding out my chest, because I promised I would never leave his side."

The family says there are too many people in the U.S. to have a shortage of organ donors. They say they now hope Nick's organs will be able to help others.

Devin plans to graduate high school in the spring, KHOU-TV reported, something his brother had wanted to achieve before he died.

"That was [Nick's] big dream when his doctor asked what he wanted in life, he wanted to graduate," his mother, Margi Coats, told the station. The ordeal has been extremely tough on Devin.

"He's trying to heal through this too," she said. "He's got his life and yet his brother doesn't. It's been very very hard for both of them."

Before Nick's death, Devin asked his brother if there was anything specific he wanted Devin to do as he went through life. Nick's response: "Just be me and do what I want to do."

"I said 'I got that,'" Devin told the station.

The family doesn't have life insurance for Nick and said Margi is out of work, KHOU-TV says. You can donate to the family here.

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Photo credit: GoFundMe