UPDATE: Patient From Failed Uterine Transplant Speaks Out

It was a short-lived success for the first uterus transplant in the United States. Just two weeks after a successful surgery, the patient had the organ removed.

Although the 26-year-old recipient, Lindsey McFarland, was recovering well, she experienced a sudden complication shortly after the February 24 procedure. Both McFarland and her doctors at the Cleveland Clinic are now opening up about what went wrong. A Candida infection, or yeast infection, “compromised the blood supply to the uterus, causing the need for its removal,” the clinic said in a statement.

“It’s going to be a while before I work through everything just because I had such high hopes,” McFarland tells NBC News. She was still sedated when doctors told her husband, Blake, they would need to remove the uterus to protect her health. “There are days when I’m happy, and then there’s days where I’m kind of mad, and then days where I’m sad,” she adds.

The New York Times reports that the transplant surgery was a nine-hour endeavor, and the culmination of several practice surgeries. About one in every 4,500 baby girls are born without a uterus. If they want to have children of their own someday, surrogacy or adoption have historically been the only available options, making this new procedure a big deal.

The procedure is still in an experimental phase; the Cleveland hospital’s ethics panel granted the clinic permission to perform it 10 times. Afterwards, it will be determined whether or not uterine transplants can become standard practice.

The uteruses used will all be from deceased donors. And these transplants, unlike those of vital organs, will be temporary; each uterus will be removed after the recipient has a child or two, allowing her to stop taking strong transplant anti-rejection drugs. Patients will need to wait at least a year before getting pregnant, and will need IVF in order to do so.

Any pregnancies that occur with the help of these uteruses will be considered high-risk. And not much is known about the effect of anti-rejection drugs on fetuses, except they’ve been known to give the moms-to-be a greater risk of developing preeclampsia. But women are lining up for the opportunity to experience pregnancy and childbirth.

“I crave that experience,” an anonymous candidate and mom of two adopted children tells The New York Times. “I want the morning sickness, the backaches, the feet swelling. I want to feel the baby move. That is something I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.”

While this is a relatively new endeavor in the US medical field, there has been some success with the procedure in Sweden, where nine women have received uterine transplants from live donors. The first healthy baby was successfully delivered in September 2014, followed by three others.

Because of her complications, Lindsey McFarland will not be eligible for this uterine transplant surgery again. But she is planning to use a surrogate—her mother—to carry her embyros from a previous IVF procedure.

“We’re going to take a few years to focus on our boys and me build up strength and get back to normal. Then we’ll start the process,” she says. “Infertility is a journey most people don’t understand unless they’ve dealt with it, so I think it’s amazing that science has come so far to provide families and couples with an opportunity like this to build their family.”