Posted on 12/15/2009 7:00:35 PM PST by delacoert
Thirteen extremely sick patients. Highly skilled surgeons who performed 26 operations, a quick-thinking organ transplant expert and big-hearted donors. They were all part of a recent record-setting kidney swap in the nation's capital that was part of a major push to get transplants to patients who might not usually qualify. And when it was over, all 13 people had received lifesaving kidneys, the Associated Press reports.
So Georgetown University Hospital's kidney transplant director, Dr. Keith Melancon, came up with an unusual option: If both Williams and Irene Otten could get a near- perfect donor kidney (a kidney that just a few of their immune system's elevated antibodies recognize), then he could filter from their blood a sufficient quantity of the remaining antibodies so that the new kidney would survive. This filtering procedure is known as plasmapheresis.
Whenever there is a kidney exchange, the pool of potential donors expands because patients can find friends or relatives who may not be compatible with them but who are willing to donate on their behalf, according to The AP. That way, there can be kidney mixing and matching.
It turned out, according to The AP, that Tom Otten could donate a kidney to Williams. And Irene Otten found a match in another young woman. When Williams' father agreed to donate, another impossible-to-match grandmother had found her match. And so it went. Weeks of complex planning for the surgeries ensued, punctuated by ups and downs, The AP noted, as donors and recipients were juggled. Some had to drop out, including one with heart problems. But 13 pairs eventually emerged.
"A whole new doorway of hope opened," said Tom Otten, a police officer from suburban St. Louis who gave a kidney to a stranger earlier in December so his wife could get one in return.
The 13-way kidney swap began when Otten's wife, Irene, was unable to find a suitable donor. Tests had shown that she couldn't tolerate a kidney from 95% of the population, according to The AP. A 30-year-old mother in Washington, Roxanne Boyd Williams, faced similar odds.
Of the 13 patients who received transplants in operations at Georgetown and nearby Washington Hospital Center, five got kidneys only because of the blood filtering procedure, The AP reported. Ten were Hispanic, black or Asian, which is significant. Minorities are less likely than white Americans to get a kidney transplant from a living donor, which is considered the best kind.
Although there are about 88,000 people now on the national waiting list for a kidney, slightly more than one-third are black. However, blacks get just 13% of living-donor kidneys because they are more likely than whites to have diabetes and hyptertension, two conditions that can destroy a kidney. So more blacks are on dialysis, with fewer possible donor candidates among friends and relatives.
Fewer than 17,000 kidney transplants are performed annually, and there is an average five-year wait for a kidney.
"You are going to die a lot earlier sitting on that dialysis machine than if you get transplanted," Melancon told The AP. Pairing domino kidney transplants with plasmapheresis, the blood-cleansing treatment, is one of his goals.
The domino kidney exchanges and the blood-cleansing treatments multiply the number of annual transplants that can be performed, according to Melancon, and the two procedures could enable up to 4,000 more transplants a year. "It's really almost a religious experience when we start doing this, because it's miraculous, it really is," he told The AP.
Life changes dramatically after a kidney transplant, according to internist Dr. Blanca Sckell, who handles the primary care program at St. Vincent's Hospital. Patients must be on immunosuppressive drugs for life, which weaken the immune system. It takes about a year for the kidney recipient to feel back to normal, and there is the possibility of organ rejection, she says.
"But with advances in technology and DNA mapping and matching, rejection is much less common," Sckell said. "You're no longer hooked up to a machine. The transplant has saved your life."
For a patient like Williams, the transplant could be a way for her to get her life as a mom back on track and have the energy to care for her 2-year-old twins and 7-month-old baby.
She needed a transplant because she came down with lupus while in college and it quickly destroyed her kidneys. Williams, who had received a kidney from her sister that failed in her second pregnancy, met Tom Otten a week after this most recent surgery.
"It's a large gift to give someone, something so selfless," she said as she held his hand,. "God bless you."
This is how it will happen under Obamacare and his thugs...
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/anonymous_philanthropist_donates
Yep. This is an amazing accomplishment, and Obama will ban it. Those of us still waiting will die.
Are you on the list? I had a cadaveric transplant in May 2008.
The remarkable stories within this story include the fact that 10 of the 13 recipients were minorities, and that this type of complex procedure works to overcome the difficulty of the tissue matching for minority groups.
All of it a testament to the outstanding quality of the medical profession in our great country. How anyone can even entertain the notion that the federal government will do anything but ruin it is beyond me.
Congratulations on the transplant -- I hope to be there one day.
I'm not on the list yet. My kidneys are holding out a lot better than the doctors expected. The deterioration has basically stopped, an inch away from dialysis. I have no way of knowing how long this will continue, but I'm grateful for it. It can't be forever, though.
Your condition sounds a lot like my Wife’s.
This is the best a kidney patient could hope for. Another 30 years of this would be nice.
I can relate. I was “an inch from dialysis” for over a year (GFR 8-10 for that long; BUN in the high 80s to low 90s). I had a kidney cyst rupture (I have PKD), and that did me in. I did dialysis for 9 months, and with the 7th call (almost 3 years on “the list), I got a 16 year old kidney.
Best of luck; I hope you keep off dialysis for as long as possible, but when you do need it, you will feel better (the fatigue, mental cloudiness, etc creeps up on you, and you don’t realize it’s extent until you start dialysis and even moreso, get a transplant).
That should be interesting. I've noticed those things, but I figured I was just getting old (pushing 50 now). If they went away...
That’s young, not old. After all, I’m only 4 years behind you.
I have a blog of my personal experiences with kidney failure/dialysis/transplant if you’re interested: http://chronicpositivity.com/
Feel free to FReepmail me if you have any questions.
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