Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, June 8, 1995                   TAG: 9506080072
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: From Associated Press and New York Times reports
DATELINE: DALLAS                                LENGTH: Medium

MANTLE'S CHANCES OF SURVIVAL DEPEND ON LIVER TRANSPLANT

A liver transplant doctors say is needed to save the life of former baseball great Mickey Mantle may be performed as soon as this morning, a television station reported late Wednesday night.

KXAS-TV said three unnamed hospital sources confirmed that a liver had been found. The station reported that last-minute preparations were being done to test whether the donated organ would be compatible.

The report could not immediately be confirmed by The Associated Press.

Earlier Wednesday, doctors said, Mantle, jaundiced, stricken with liver cancer and confined to a hospital bed, has two to four weeks to live unless he gets a liver transplant.

They are confident of keeping him alive until a transplant can be performed, if a liver becomes available in time.But they warned that Mantle could take a sudden turn for the worse.

``He will not get out of the hospital without a transplant,'' said Dr.Robert Goldstein, a transplant surgeon at Baylor University Medical Center here.

On Tuesday afternoon, doctors at Baylor told Mantle, a 63-year-old baseball Hall of Fame member who reigned for two decades as the New York Yankees' star slugger, that only a liver transplant could save him. The doctors said the cancer was caused by a combination of lifelong heavy drinking and a surgical blood transfusion, perhaps decades ago, that was tainted by a hepatitis virus.

Mantle, too feeble to rise from his bed by himself, initially fell silent at the news, but then lifted his head and rallied.

``I'm a fighter,'' he said, according to Goldstein. ``I want to go forward and do whatever we have to do. It goes back to my days as a ballplayer. I never give up.''

Although Mantle's determination to live helps his case, his chances are at best uncertain, even if he does get a timely transplant. Dr.Richard Thistlewaite, chief of transplantation at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, said that previous studies had shown that only 20 to 30 percent of patients with liver cancer receiving transplants survived disease-free for five years.

Mantle's prospects are likely to be improved by an experimental treatment combining intensive chemotherapy, which started Wednesday, and the transplant. But long-term survival rates with this treatment are unknown.

Mantle's illness threatens to become the final blow against a slugger whose epic home runs and boyish, blond looks transfixed New York City and the nation. He lost his best friend, Billy Martin, in an alcohol-related vehicular accident in 1989. In 1993, one of his four sons, Danny, sought treatment for alcoholism, and early last year, Mantle did too. Soon after Mantle was released from a treatment center, another of his sons, Billy, who had suffered from Hodgkin's disease and became addicted to heavy painkillers, collapsed and died of a heart attack at a drug treatment center.

On May 28, he checked into Baylor's medical center with severe stomach pains. Tests since then yielded Tuesday's report that a cancerous tumor is blocking the bile ducts in his liver.

``If he doesn't get a liver in a couple, three weeks, he's going to die,'' said Kent Hamilton, a Baylor gastroenterologist. ``The alcohol and the hepatitis C were a witch's brew.''