Archive for September, 2009

Giving a kidney not as hard as it seems, and fulfills the ultimate commandment

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Thursday, September 17, 2009 |
Giving a kidney not as hard as it seems, and fulfills the ultimate commandment
by Tish Levee

In his opinion, “Selling your kidney – - a mitzvah?” in the July 31st article, Jeff Stier, the associate director of the American Council on Science and Health, stated, “Clearly the incentive to save a life isn’t enough, or synagogues would be sponsoring kidney drives alongside their blood drives.”

What an excellent idea!

Not only do we already have blood drives, of course, but several synagogues around the Bay Area recently have responded to the critical need for stem cell transplants by having bone marrow drives.

So why not a kidney drive?

Actually, my synagogue did just that. Four years ago, on Erev Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi George Schlesinger announced that the father of a congregant needed a kidney.

Congregation Beth Ami in Santa Rosa isn’t large – just 220 families – but without even knowing who the congregant was, five people volunteered to donate a kidney. Unfortunately, health concerns precluded all but one of them from donating.

At age 66, however, I was deemed healthy enough to do so, which was very life-affirming.

When asked why I was doing this, my reply was, “Why not? HaShem has given me life and health and a spare kidney. The chances I’ll ever need it are remote. There is a person who needs a kidney in order to live. So why shouldn’t I give him one of mine? I can spare it.”

Perhaps a more appropriate response, however, would be to explore “why I should” rather than just say “why shouldn’t I?”

The Jerusalem Talmud tells us that “he who saves a life, it is as if he has saved the whole world.” Rabbinical authorities from all streams of Judaism view posthumous organ donation as a mitzvah, a commandment or obligation, not just a good deed.

In Judaism, pikuach nefesh, the commandment to save a life, overrides all others. We do not really have a choice about doing this mitzvah. However, because saving our own life comes first, not all rabbis feel that living organ donation carries the same weight.

But the risks when donating a kidney are extremely low; it’s roughly comparable to the annual risk of dying in a car accident while commuting.

A donor must pass a rigorous health screening, and advances in transplant surgery – especially in laparoscopic surgery (”belly button surgery”) to remove organs means recovery time is brief. Even at age 66, I was back at work managing a residential facility less than two months after surgery. My friend Dee, also 66 years old, returned to her law practice in three weeks. Younger people have even quicker recoveries.

Longitudinal studies have shown that living kidney donors have as good or better physical health than the general population and their emotional and spiritual

health is much better.

Over the last 10 years, the number of people waiting for a kidney has risen 86 percent, but the number of transplants has grown only 31 percent.

Of the 103,000 people currently waiting for a transplant, 80,600 are waiting for a kidney, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.

Any of them could receive a living kidney (a transplant from a living person), which is one possible treatment for someone who has kidney failure, often called end-stage renal disease. Other options are dialysis and a transplant from a deceased person.

But a living kidney, which will keep working for an average of 18 years, is the best possible treatment.

Unfortunately, the shortage of donors means that the average patient waits seven and a half years for a kidney. Each year, 4,500 people, half of them older than 60, die while waiting.

The National Kidney Foundation recently announced a comprehensive initiative called End the Wait! Implementing its recommendations, including the removal of disincentives for living donors, could “end the wait” by 2019.

One big disincentive for potential donors is financial – the thousands of dollars many donors must spend for travel, lost wages and other out-of-pocket costs. HR 218, the Living Organ Donor Tax Credit Act of 2009, would give living donors a non-refundable tax credit up to $5,000 for these expenses.

Including living organ donors in the Pre-existing Condition Patient Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 1558, S. 623) as part of the Obama administration’s health care reform package would remove any fear that donors would not be covered if they had to change insurance policies.

Urge your representatives in Congress to support both of these resolutions.

Last year nearly 30 percent of the more than 16,000 kidney transplants came from living donors. Doubling that number could save thousands of lives plus hundreds of millions of dollars annually in dialysis costs — costs paid by taxpayer dollars through Medicare. For more information, visit http://www.kidney.org.

The second weekend in November is designated as National Organ Donor Shabbat. Information packets are available from the California Transplant Donor Network by calling (510) 251-7010 or sending an e-mail to lstanley@ctdn.org.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our rabbis spoke about the mitzvah of being a living organ donor and donating posthumously on that Shabbat, and our synagogues had a “kidney drive” that Sunday?

Tish Levee lives in Santa Rosa, where she is a member of Congregation Beth Ami. She writes “Mitzvah Moments,” a column in the West County Gazette, and can be reached at mitzvahmoments@sonic.net.

http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/39935/giving-a-kidney-not-as-hard-as-it-seems-and-fulfills-the-ultimate-commandme/
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“Kidney transplants: Saving lives”

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

http://www.jacksonville.com/opinion/editorials/2009-09-20/story/kidney_transplants_saving_lives

Kidney transplants: Saving lives

George Harvey’s prayers, at last, have been answered.

For longer than the local inner-city pastor would care to remember, he has been praying for a donor kidney.

His kidneys don’t work properly. That means he must spend hours a week undergoing dialysis, which purifies the blood like a normal kidney would do.

It’s a long and expensive process – and one that has robbed him of his strength.

Fortunately, his son Benjamin recently volunteered to donate one of his kidneys. If he is accepted as a donor by Mayo Clinic, Harvey’s problems may soon be a thing of the past.

If so, Harvey will be one of the lucky ones. In most cases, recipients get organs from dead donors – and that usually means a long wait.

Waiting lists

Nearly 500 people are on the waiting list for kidney transplants at the local Mayo Clinic, according to Thomas Gonwa, a physician and chairman of its Department of Transplantation.

Between 2 percent to 5 percent of those patients die while waiting for a transplant each year.

Nationwide, The Miami Herald reports, 18 people die every day while waiting for organ transplants.

Mayo typically performs about 100 kidney transplants a year. That accounts for one-third of all organ transplants at the facility.

Harvey’s worries are not over. Donors have to be in excellent health, and many are excluded in Mayo’s pre-surgery medical evaluations.

The most common causes for exclusion, Gonwa says, are obesity, hypertension, abnormal kidney function and anatomical abnormalities in the donor.

But if his son does pass the medical screening and the transplant takes place, Harvey will be lucky.

The five-year patient survival rate for recipients of a living donor transplant is 90.1 percent. The rate for those with kidneys from a deceased donor is a little smaller, 81.9 percent.

Ideally, more people should donate a kidney, assuming they have two healthy ones.

Overcoming fears

But there are two obstacles, one legitimate and one not.

Fear one: If someone gives up a kidney, he will die if the remaining one fails.

That’s unlikely. Of all the people who have donated kidneys at Mayo, Gonwa says, none have died as a result of the other one failing.

Fear two: It can be too expensive for the donor.

That is a legitimate concern.

Medical expenses are covered by insurance, but there is no reimbursement for lost wages.

And the clinic tells donors that they may need six weeks to recuperate, particularly if they do a lot of physical work.

It has been reported that live kidney donors typically live longer than those who do not donate.

That’s true, Gonwa confirms, but it’s a little misleading. To donate, a person has to be “basically in perfect health.”

That means he would be expected to live longer than the population as a whole.

Nationwide, unfortunately, fewer live organ transplants are taking place, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

The Miami Herald says the trend began at the end of last year, and it might be because of the recession; people cannot afford to take several weeks off work.

What’s worse, the number of deceased donors also has dropped slightly across the nation – from 8,085 in 2007 to 7,984 last year.

Greatest gift

There is little risk in becoming a live donor and absolutely nothing to fear if you want to donate a kidney after your death.

When he finally gets his donor kidney, Harvey will be able to return to preaching the gospel, and leading his flock, with his old intensity.

When one donates an organ, it affects more than just the recipient. It impacts everyone around him – not just now, but perhaps many years in the future.

In some cases, that could be hundreds, even thousands, of people.

An organ donation, whether it’s a live person’s kidney or a deceased person’s liver, is more than the gift of life.

It’s the gift of endless possibilities.

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Would you give life to someone else if you didn’t have to give up your own?

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Doing Good Deeds: Teacher donates kidney to student

September 16, 2009 By SUSANA ENRIQUEZ susana.enriquez@newsday.com

Jennifer Mazzotta-Perretti never expected that, after giving students an assignment to write about their experiences doing good deeds, she would have the opportunity to do one herself.

One student in her summer creative writing class at Nassau BOCES in Wantagh posed the question: Would you give life to someone else if you didn’t have to give up your own? She said yes, she would.

Then he asked if she would donate one of her kidneys – to him. Again, she said yes.

At the time the student, Kevin O’Brien, didn’t need a transplant. Later, when he did, he remembered her answer and asked her again.

She pledged that she would, not expecting it to work out because the odds were against two unrelated people being a match.

But after a blood donor card arrived in the mail stating that her blood type was O positive – the same as his – she felt compelled to undergo more testing and learned that their match went beyond blood.

That’s when the single mother of one from Levittown prayed – and decided to go through with the donation.

“It was an awesome feeling that I was going to help this kid with more than reading and writing,” said Mazzotta-Perretti, 32, who is also the special education director at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns & Rockaway.

On Sept. 3 at Columbia University Medical Center, Mazzotta-Perretti fulfilled her promise and gave 19-year-old O’Brien one of her kidneys.

O’Brien said that after years of feeling tired, he immediately felt energized.

“You wake up and you’re like, ‘Whoa, is this for real?’ ” said O’Brien, of Oyster Bay. “I feel better than I have in quite some time.”

When he was 3, blood drawn from a finger prick led to the discovery of an obstruction in one of his ureters – tubes that connect the kidneys to the bladder – that was causing urine to back up and damage the right kidney.

Within months, surgeons implanted the tube deeper into the kidney to prevent the reflux. Two years later, the same procedure was necessary for his left kidney. But the surgeries were a temporary fix: Doctors said he would eventually need a kidney transplant.

A decade later, on July 1, 2005, O’Brien received a kidney from his father, Neil. But soon after, that kidney began to fail because the drugs he was taking to keep his body from rejecting the new kidney made him susceptible to a virus, which damaged the kidney.

His mother, Heidi, wasn’t a match for her son and tried to arrange a kidney swap: She would donate a kidney to someone she did match – and who, in turn, would provide a willing donor who was a match for Kevin.

That strategy didn’t pay off, and Kevin’s name was put on a waiting list – where it could have taken him eight years to get to the top.

“We were devastated,” said Heidi O’Brien, 52, of Oyster Bay. “We had done everything we could do.”

Then Mazzotta-Perretti called her and said she would give Kevin her kidney. Heidi O’Brien said she was “in awe that a person would do that for my child.”

“We are so grateful to Jennifer,” she said.

To pay Mazzotta-Perretti’s favor forward, Kevin O’Brien said he wants to work with scientists to clone human organs. He said he also wants to encourage people to donate the organs of their deceased loved ones and pledge to donate their own organs when they die.

“Give the organs to someone who can use them,” he said.

But first, now that his health is improving, O’Brien will have to finish his junior and senior years of high school.

Looking back on his quest for a donor, O’Brien said the best thing he did was put his teacher on the spot.

“You gotta not be afraid to ask for what you need,” he said. “I needed a kidney and I have it.”

http://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/nassau-boces-teacher-donates-kidney-to-student-1.1453840
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