While Silas Waits

Twenty-seven-year-old Silas Thing Sørensen is one of approximately 24 people in Denmark on the waiting list for a liver transplant. While Silas Waits follows him through a period in which an extraordinary situation has become part of ordinary life.

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A personal photo essay about life on the liver transplant waiting list

Silas Thing Sørensen is a member of the ERN RARE-LIVER Youth Panel and lives with Alagille syndrome. Having undergone three liver transplants as a child, he was waiting for a fourth at the time this photo essay was created. In While Silas Waits, Danish photojournalist Emil Mogensen offers a personal insight into Silas’ everyday life – a life shaped by routines, relationships and plans for the future, but also by the uncertainty of waiting for a donor liver.

 

Living while waiting

Waiting for an organ transplant can mean living with uncertainty. There is no fixed date to prepare for and no way of knowing when the call might come. At the same time, everyday life continues. Through his photographs and conversations with Silas, Emil Mogensen documents this period of waiting without reducing Silas’ life to his diagnosis or transplantation. The photo essay follows Silas through ordinary moments and routines: at home, taking his medication, and spending time with the people around him. These everyday scenes sit alongside the reality that his health can determine what is possible from one day to the next.

Life beyond the diagnosis

Silas’ story is also about the things that matter to him beyond his disease.

His work and interests form an important part of the photo essay, as do his relationships with family and friends. Together, the photographs show a young person making plans and building a life while carrying an uncertainty that most people his age do not have to consider. 

This perspective is also central to the work of the ERN RARE-LIVER Youth Panel: young people living with rare liver diseases are patients, but their lives, ambitions and identities extend far beyond their diagnoses.

 

The reality of transplantation

For Silas, hospitals and transplantation have been part of life since childhood. Having already received three liver transplants, the possibility of another transplant brings with it experiences that are both familiar and deeply personal. Mogensen’s photographs do not attempt to explain every medical aspect of transplantation. Instead, they document what it means to live alongside it: the routines, the waiting, the people around Silas and the uncertainty about what comes next.

The result is a quiet and personal portrait of a period in Silas’ life – not only of waiting for a transplant, but of continuing to live while waiting.

 

 

Photography and original text by Emil Mogensen.

This article presents an edited selection from Emil Mogensen’s original photo essay, While Silas Waits, and is published by ERN RARE-LIVER with the permission of Silas Thing Sørensen and Emil Mogensen.

View the original photo essay on Emil Mogensen’s website.