"I saw everything," says 74-year-old Harry Stackhouse from Illinois, who was awake during his recent kidney transplant. He felt no pain as he chatted with doctors, examined the donor organ, and watched the surgical team staple him back up.

Stackhouse was discharged just 36 hours after the procedure at Northwestern Medicine, which aims to make transplants without risky general anesthesia commonplace.

Performed in a little over an hour on July 15, this was the second such surgery led by Satish Nadig, director of the Chicago-based hospital system's Comprehensive Transplant Center. He has since carried out a third.

"We're at an inflection point in transplantation today in being able to use the technologies that we have around us to really push us into this next era," Nadig told AFP.

It may sound off-putting or even scary, but the medical benefits of using a spinal anesthetic for kidney transplants – similar to what's already done during cesarean sections – are well established.