A woman with cancer that spread to her liver is getting a second chance at life after receiving a partial liver transplant from a living donor.
Amy Piccioli told ABC’s Good Morning America doctors have told her she currently has no evidence of the disease three months after she underwent transplant surgery at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.
“I’m just looking forward to living my life again without cancer being at the forefront of my mind,” she said.
Piccioli, a mom of three, was diagnosed with Stage 4 colorectal cancer in May 2024. At the time, she said she had visited an emergency room near her home in Los Angeles for dehydration and had imaging done, which ended up showing she had a mass in her colon that had spread and caused lesions in her liver.
“I had no symptoms of colon cancer, nothing,” Piccioli said of her health prior to her emergency room visit, noting that she had no family history of the disease. “For this to happen was just such a shock to me, because I am so cognizant of changes in my body.”
In the United States, colorectal cancer is the third-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men and the fourth-leading cause in women, according to the American Cancer Society. It is the second-most common cause of cancer deaths when numbers for men and women are combined.
Piccioli said she underwent multiple rounds of chemotherapy and started immunotherapy medication but also consulted with her doctors about the possibility of getting a liver transplant. She was later referred to Northwestern Medicine, which has one of the only programs in the U.S. with a liver transplant program specifically for people with colorectal cancer that has spread to the liver.