In the early morning hours of May 13, a surgical team at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset did something no hospital on Long Island had ever done: they transplanted a pancreas. Northwell Health announced the milestone Monday, and the reason it waited three months to say anything is the best part of the story. The patient is home, his new kidney is working, his blood sugar is holding steady, and for the first time in decades he needs neither insulin injections nor dialysis.

A 10-hour operation, two organs, one donor

The patient is Carlyle Preudhomme Jr., a 47-year-old audio engineer who has spent his career mixing hip-hop and R&B records. He had lived with type 1 diabetes for decades, the kind of long fight that slowly takes territory: dangerous blood sugar swings that put him in the hospital, then chronic kidney disease, then kidney function below 5 percent and a dialysis schedule that owned his week.

The answer was a simultaneous kidney-pancreas transplant, both organs from a single deceased donor, performed over roughly 10 hours by Dr. Niraj Desai and Dr. Lawrence Lau of the Northwell Transplant Institute. The logic of the double operation is elegant. The new kidney replaces the one diabetes destroyed. The new pancreas replaces the organ whose failure caused the destruction in the first place, producing insulin the way a healthy body does. Fix only the kidney and the disease starts in on the replacement. Fix both and the cycle stops.

Why this had never happened here

Pancreas transplantation is rare and demanding surgery. Just over 800 are performed in the United States in a year, and until now, none of them had ever happened on Long Island, because no hospital here was approved to do one. Long Islanders who needed the operation went into Manhattan or further, and their families did the visiting-hours commute that goes with it.

That changed in December 2025, when the New York State Department of Health approved a pancreas transplant program at North Shore University Hospital, the first on the Island. The May operation was the program's proof. With it, the hospital's Transplant Institute becomes one of only 59 adult transplant centers in the country offering all five major organ programs: heart, kidney, liver, lung and pancreas.

Who this is for

Type 1 diabetes affects roughly 2 million Americans, and about 40 percent of them will develop chronic kidney disease. That is the population this program exists for: people managing two failing systems at once, whose best medical option was, until this spring, a bridge or tunnel away. A combined transplant can end both dialysis and insulin dependence in a single operation, which is why transplant teams consider it the closest thing to a cure that exists for patients in Preudhomme's situation.

The demand is not abstract. More than 109,000 Americans currently need an organ transplant, with about 61,000 on active waiting lists. Deceased-donor programs like this one depend entirely on registered donors, of whom there were more than 23,000 nationally last year, a record.

What it means for the reader

Medical firsts can read like press-release wallpaper, so here is the practical version. If you or someone in your family is a type 1 diabetic in kidney failure, the operation that can end both conditions is now performed in Nassau County, by a team that has done it and announced the result. The evaluation, the surgery, the months of follow-up appointments that transplant medicine requires: all of it can now happen on the Island. For the patients this program was built for, the first one is the only proof that matters, and he is back home with a working pancreas he was not born with.