Super surgeon

Consultant liver surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham Dr Darius F. Mirza’s expertise is sought not only in the UK but in different corners of the world.

Last year when 32-year-old Brendon Cole became Australia’s first recipient of a successful intestinal transplant, operated by surgeon Bob Jones, it was Mirza who flew in to assist the surgery. Following the risky surgical procedure Cole received a new pancreas, liver, small intestine and duodenum, notes a write-up in The Medical News of July 4, 2010. Suffering from a digestive disorder since his childhood, Cole who had been functioning for the last 13 years with a tube in his arm had been given a two-year survival chance without the replacement surgery. "The operation was funded by the Victorian government and the costs between $ 300,000-400,000 appear to be a bargain because it cost about $ 120,000 each year just to keep Cole alive,” notes the article. Relieved that patients can now undergo such surgery in Australia unlike earlier when "people needing this operation had to travel abroad…” Jones described the operation as "the last frontier in organ replacement.”

Dr Darius Mirza: transplanting vital organs

The year prior Mirza was one of the key surgeons when around 55 medical staff and support workers were involved in a multiple transplant procedure requiring the performance of five life saving transplant operations from two donors in 24 hours. Mirza had led the team performing transplant for an 11-year-old boy who was the recipient of a stomach, pancreas and intestine from the first donor, it was reported in the Daily Mail of August 15, 2009. Simultaneously he also led the team which retrieved organs from the second donor and carried out the transplant operation on another 14-year-old adolescent, the last of the five transplant operations that day. The retrieval operations required four surgeons, an anesthetist, two technicians, two nurses, two coordinators and a theater assistant. The transplant team included one or two transplant surgeons, two assistant surgeons, an anesthetist, two technicians, one nurse, one coordinator and one theater assistant.

Just a month earlier Mirza had led a team to climb Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro, 5,895 m, to raise £ 25,000 for McMillan Cancer Services. "Four members of Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s liver unit joined a group of 26 fundraisers from all over the UK for a week long adventure to this Tanzanian destination for some serious fundraising and self torture,” it was mentioned in Inside Out, July 2009, the newsletter of the University Hospital’s Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust.

A decade earlier when Mirza performed a successful liver transplant surgery on rock guitarist Roye Albrighton he was rewarded with the musician performing an exclusive concert for him. As noted an article in Evening Mail, September 29, 2000, "The 51-year-old from Stafford who had just 18 months to live when a suitable donor was found said, ‘I wanted to do something to show Dr Mirza the end result of the fantastic care and work he and his staff have done for me. I’ve returned to the studio to record a new album and many of the lyrics have been inspired by what I’ve experienced over the last year. If it wasn’t for Dr Mirza and his staff I wouldn’t be here to do this so it is my way of saying thank you for giving me a second chance in life.’”

Author and coauthor of many professional publications and journals, Mirza has lectured in the USA, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Several times he has returned to the country of his birth and spoken under the auspices of the Indian Liver Transplant Association and performed 16 liver operations along with two Japanese liver transplant surgeons at the Tata Memorial Hospital.

Born in Poona to Dr Firoze and Elinor Mirza, Darius’ early education was at St Mary’s School and St Xavier’s College in Bombay, after which he completed his MBBS from the G. S. Medical College in Bombay before earning a fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and Glasgow. For a short while he gained experience in Vienna and Bombay and has been with the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for the last two decades. His wife Shirin is a well-known gynecologist and their son Jeremy is studying marine biology in Southampton.