Doctors perform triple swap of kidneys

BALTIMORE - Three kidney donors and the three people who received their organs had an emotional meeting four days after the carefully choreographed transplant surgeries.

"We each have a piece of each other inside us," recipient Germaine Allum said through tears at a hospital news conference Friday.

The meeting came after what is believed to be the world's first simultaneous "triple swap" kidney transplant operation Monday at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

A woman from Miami, a woman from Pittsburgh and a teenager from Maryland, all of whom were on dialysis, came to the Baltimore hospital with donors whose blood or tissue types didn't match their own.

Nurses made matches between the three pairs from a hospital database of about 60 pairs, and doctors performed the surgeries Monday.

Lead surgeon Dr. Robert Montgomery called the 11 hours of coordinated surgeries, with nurses rushing kidneys in labeled coolers from the donors to the recipients, "logistically, a monumental experience."

The operations were done simultaneously because organs can be damaged the longer they are kept outside the body. He also said it was important "to avoid any possibility of anyone backing out, someone getting in a car accident, whatever. If all the operations start at the same time, it removes those variables."

Montgomery said the patients and donors were doing well and had cleared the most dangerous time for transplant patients - the first few days after an operation.

Donors were Julia Tower, 57, from Hyattsville; Connie Dick, 41, from Latrobe, Pa.; and Paul Boissiere, 30, from Coral Gables.

Recipients were Jeremy Weiser-Warschoff, 13, of Silver Spring, Md.; Tracy Stahl, 39, of Johnstown, Pa., and Allum, 30, of Coral Gables.

The process began in October, when Dick offered to donate a kidney to her sister, Stahl.

The sisters had the same blood type, but Stahl had harmful antibodies, or blood proteins, that would attack and destroy Dick's kidney tissue. Doctors tried unsuccessfully to filter Stahl's blood of the antibodies.

Stahl's antibodies precluded her from a match with nearly every patient in the database. But during tests, nurses found that Tower, who had originally wanted to donate her kidney to Jeremy, the son of her friends, had a rare tissue type that was compatible with Stahl's.

"That bond (between Stahl and Tower) became the centerpiece of the whole exchange," Montgomery said. It also made a triple swap necessary, he said, because Stahl's sister, Dick, wasn't a match for Jeremy.

In Jeremy's case, a transplant kidney he received as a baby had begun to fail this year, Montgomery said. Boissiere's blood was incompatible with his fiance, Allum, but his tissue and blood matched Jeremy's, so he became the teen's donor. Dick had the same blood type as Allum and became her donor.

"It was a eureka-type moment when they solved this puzzle," Montgomery said of the team that matched the pairs.

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