Bobby Tinnell then became a prisoner in his own home, too sick to attend his daughter's wedding.

Four days after his marriage in May 2000, doctors told him his liver was failing. Four years later, Tinnell still wasn't close to the top of the transplant list at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, one of the state's two transplant programs.

Not wanting to become one of the 3,000 people who die every year waiting for an organ transplant, Tinnell put his name on Cincinnati's University Hospital waiting list in September 2003. And now he wants every Kentuckian to know liver patients can be on many states' lists.

"A lot of people don't know liver transplants are available, let alone that you can be listed in multiple states," said Mary Anne Tinnell.

Doctors in Cincinnati found a matching liver in just four months. Tinnell was too sick at the time for the operation, but doctors found a second match just a month later.

University Hospital transplant surgeon Steve Rudich says patients have shorter waits because the percentage of Ohioans on the liver transplant list isn't as high as it statistically should be when compared to the rest of the nation.

In a state of about 12 million, only 200 are waiting for a liver. By comparison, a single hospital with a moderate to large transplant program in other states will have 300 to 400 on its list.

University Hospital shortens the wait in Ohio by using organs traditionally deemed inferior. Surgeons in Cincinnati will use a liver from a person who is over 65, obese or a convicted felon.

Dr. Guy Neff, medical director of liver transplantation at University, says the hospital has adopted the theory that more people die waiting for the "perfect liver" than if they receive an organ traditionally believed to be unusable.

University Hospital has an 88 percent to 90 percent survival rate one year after the surgery. He said in the last year-and-a-half, only two people have died while waiting for a transplant at the hospital.

Nationally, 10-15 percent of the people waiting for transplants die, Rudich said.

Neff said when he practiced at the University of Miami School of Medicine in the late '90s about 80 to 100 people were dying on that list every year.

"Our goal is not to have a single University Hospital patient die," Rudich says. "This doesn't make our program better or worse; it's just our philosophy. We can't afford for our patients to wait for the best donor to show up."

Roberta Stavole, chapter director for the American Liver Foundation of Ohio, said every transplant hospital has different criteria.

University Hospital "does it a little differently than the Cleveland Clinic," he said. "And the University of Miami does it yet another way. It is always better to shop around - even for a liver."

There are 59 agencies responsible for collection and placement of organs in 11 regions, said Mark Sommerville, spokesman for LifeCenter Organ Donor Network in Avondale, the agency that supplies University Hospital. Sommerville said the two transplant centers in Kentucky are in a different region while Indiana transplant centers are in yet a third region.

He said patients increase their odds of getting a liver by listing at hospitals in the different regions. Patients within the region get first chance at organs procured in that region.

"It's always better to have first access to more than one pool of livers," he said. "You can see how it would increase one's chance."

After a liver has been identified, the patient needs to be at the hospital within three to eight hours.

Mary Anne Tinnell said she literally turned the car around when she received a page that University Hospital had a liver ready for her husband.

"I had left my desk a mess at work," she said. "We had the kids with us and we didn't have time to drop them off at their respective places. Plus, we had an extra teenager living with us. Cincinnati said we had to get there quickly."

She said the 101/2-hour surgery was difficult. Her husband's liver fell into pieces when surgeons tried to remove it.

But the surgery was a success.

Tinnell, now 52, said he can eat without throwing up, exercise and enjoy life.

"I don't take anything for granted anymore," he said.

For more information about liver transplants, go to www.optn.org.

E-mail jhannah@enquirer.com