A head-on car accident sidelined a young mother. A rare transplant was the only option to get his life back.

For Lacy Cornelius Boyd, March 19, 2024 was an exciting day. She and her husband had taken their 6-year-old daughter to the Grand Canyon as part of a family road trip. Boyd, her husband and their daughter planned to stop at McDonald’s before heading home to Oklahoma.

Everything was going well, until their car hit a patch of black ice.

“We were spinning. My husband obviously lost control and hit another car head-on,” Boyd recalls. Everything else was blurry.

Boyd’s daughter had a broken arm. Her husband and the other driver were fine. Boyd had broken neck and ribs, a collapsed lung and severe intestinal injuries. She underwent six surgeries in five days.

But the damage to his intestines — caused by a seat belt that was too tight — kept getting worse, Boyd said.

“They were trying to save my intestines, and every time they went back in, they just died from lack of blood flow,” Boyd said. “I was told that most people have 35 feet of small intestine. I had about 35 inches left.”

“I’m just going through the motions.”

Boyd was released from the hospital after a month. He was diagnosed with short bowel syndrome and had an ileostomy bag attached to his side to collect waste. Her remaining intestines couldn’t process the nutrients in food, so she needed 12 hours of IV nutrition per day. She said her daughter was afraid of the tubes, wires and medical devices that now filled their home. Boyd was always weak and dehydrated and never wanted to leave the house.

“If I went out to eat somewhere, I would immediately go to the bathroom, or I would have to go to the bathroom five times at a restaurant, so it was just embarrassing,” Boyd said. “I felt like everyone was enjoying their lives and I was just going through the motions.”

Boyd, who had previously worked in healthcare, met regularly with doctors to see if his quality of life could be improved. Nobody had any answers. Ultimately, she followed up on an unlikely lead. While hospitalized, a surgeon told Boyd’s sister that she should contact the Cleveland Clinic.

Boyd approached the hospital system herself in November 2024. She met with general surgeon Dr. Masato Fujiki and after an evaluation, he suggested something she had never heard of before: an intestinal transplant.

“I started crying. I think he thought I was sad, but I was really happy,” Boyd said. “Everyone told me this was going to be my life.”

A rare and risky transplant

Intestinal transplants are a rare procedure, said Dr. Adam Griesemer, a transplant surgeon at NYU Langone. In the United States, only about 100 kidney transplants are performed each year, compared with 25,000 kidney transplants each year, said Fujiki, director of the Cleveland Clinic’s intestinal transplant program.

Intestinal transplants have the worst outcomes of all transplant types, Griesemer said, so there is a “high threshold” for doctors to consider them. They are generally only recommended for children born with intestinal abnormalities and people who will rely on intravenous nutrition for the rest of their lives, like Boyd, he said.

Intestinal transplant patients “really struggle with rejection and infections,” Griesemer said. The intestines are home to bacteria, so in the event of organ rejection, the barrier preventing bacteria from entering the bloodstream breaks down. Fujiki said rejection rates have improved over the past decade, estimating they have fallen from 40% of cases to around 8%. Medications can help reduce infections, he said.

Only about 50% of patients survive more than five years after receiving the transplant, Griesemer said. In comparison, kidney transplants have a five-year survival rate of 98%.

“Prepared for the worst”

Boyd began the process of registering for an intestinal transplant in November. In July 2025, 16 months after the car accident, Boyd received the transplant at the Cleveland Clinic. The day of the operation was filled with emotion, she said.

“I was excited. I was nervous. I was sad to leave my daughter and I empathize with the donor family,” Boyd said. “But in reality, I had prepared myself for the worst.”

The operation lasted about 12 hours, Fujiki said. Everything went well. But it was just the first step in a long process: Boyd spent the next three weeks recovering in the hospital, followed by three months of outpatient recovery in Cleveland so he could stay near his care team for close monitoring.

Boyd had no complications during his recovery, Fujiki said. Her ostomy bag was removed. She no longer needed IV nutrition. The weekend before Thanksgiving, she returned to Oklahoma.

“It was amazing to be able to come home,” Boyd said.

A festive return home

Boyd arrived home just in time for beloved holiday traditions. After missing other milestones, like her daughter’s first day of school and Halloween, Boyd was relieved to take part in the celebrations.

“My daughter is six now, but my husband carries her to the Christmas tree every morning to get her presents. I don’t know how much longer she’s going to let him do that,” Boyd said. “I was like, ‘This year might be the last time, and I’m going to miss it.’ But I didn’t.”

Boyd remains on a regimen of anti-rejection medications and will continue to receive follow-up care at the Cleveland Clinic. Otherwise, normalcy reigns and it feels like the final trauma caused by the accident has been repaired, she said.

“It’s nice to take my daughter to school, pick her up, not have to worry about anything, take her and be able to go out to eat. I couldn’t drink Coke before. I couldn’t do normal things for about a year and a half,” Boyd said. “It’s so much. Everyone is just a little more at peace.”

Edited by Lucia I Suarez Sang