Five strangers donate kidneys in record swap
By GRAHAM BRINK
Published November 21, 2006
A married couple from Sarasota and another from Clermont were part of a record-setting five-way kidney swap performed last week at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The simultaneous quintuple transplant, in which five strangers gave kidneys to desperate patients, was the first of its kind, according to hospital officials.
This is "a demonstration to the rest of the country that this is what's possible when people work together," said Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of Hopkins' transplant center and head of the transplant team.
The historic operations began as a medical jigsaw puzzle.
Four of the sick patients approached the hospital with a relative willing to give them a kidney, but all four were incompatible donors for their relatives.
The hospital investigated ways for each of the four potential recipients to get a kidney from one of the donors, just not from their own relative.
To make the pieces fit, the hospital included a fifth patient from a waiting list and an altruistic donor, a person willing to give a kidney to anyone in need.
Altogether they had enough matched kidneys. The operations took 10 hours and involved six operating rooms, 12 surgeons, 11 anesthesiologists and 18 nurses. The transplants were done at the same time to prevent anyone from backing out later or in case someone fell ill.
All 10 patients were doing well, a hospital spokesman said Monday.
Sheila Thornton, 63, of Edgewood, Md., said she felt "just joy, joy," after she learned she would receive a kidney from Sandra Loevner, 63, of Sarasota, whom she had never met.
Loevner had first approached the hospital hoping to give a kidney to her husband, Gerald Loevner, a 77-year-old commercial real estate developer, father of two and grandfather, with end-stage kidney disease.
When doctors told the Loevners that their blood types were incompatible, they agreed to participate in the swap. Mrs. Loevner gave her kidney to Thornton, and Gerald Loevner received a kidney from a retired history teacher from California.
Thornton, speaking from the hospital in Baltimore, said she could not adequately convey her appreciation. "That really hit home," she said of receiving a life-saving gift from a stranger. "How do you thank somebody?"
George Lonnie Brooks, 52, of Clermont, had also approached Johns Hopkins about receiving a new kidney from his wife, but they had incompatible blood types.
Brooks, a semiretired mechanic, had developed end-stage renal disease as a result of hypertension and had been on dialysis for three years. He wound up receiving a kidney from a Christian missionary, who had intended to donate to her adoptive daughter.
Brooks' wife, Sharon, 55, who works as a maintenance administrator for a telephone company, donated her kidney to a 61-year-old father of two sons.
The transplants took place Nov. 14. All the patients could be released today.
Annie Moore, a spokeswoman for the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit organization that coordinates U.S. organ transplants, had not heard of any other quintuple kidney transplants. Triple transplants have been performed and paired transplants are becoming more common, Moore said.
Kidneys are bean-shaped organs about the size of a fist that filter impurities out of blood. The body can function on just one. Donor kidneys generally last up to 20 years.
While most transplanted kidneys come from cadavers, doctors prefer organs from live donors because success rates are higher.
About 16,500 kidney transplants were performed in the United States in 2005. About 10,000 came from cadavers and 6,500 from living donors, according to the Organ Procurement and Transportation Network.
About 70,000 people in the United States are waiting for a kidney transplant. The wait averages about five years, during which time 30,000 will either die or become too sick for a transplant, Montgomery said.
Multidonor organ swaps might save thousands of lives if U.S. lawmakers passed legislation to specifically authorize the donations on a nationwide scale, Montgomery said. Hopkins performed the first paired transplant in 2001. Since then, only about 100 have been completed nationwide.
The legalities of kidney swaps in the United States remain fuzzy. U.S law forbids donors from receiving compensation in return for giving up an organ. Swaps like this one in which donors give an organ and their relatives receive one from someone else tread close to the legal line, medical ethicists say.
Some transplant centers refuse to perform such transplants for fear of breaking the law. Montgomery said the law should be clarified to encourage them. "The legality of what we have done here is unclear, yet no one who has a mind or a heart could say that it was wrong," he said Monday.