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Very interesting!!!

Saturday, February 13th 2010, 4:00 AM
Dog handler Wade Koistinen holds a Havanese named Rumor with the woman whose life he saved by giving her one of his kidneys, Sandy McCabe.
Watts/News
Dog handler Wade Koistinen holds a Havanese named Rumor with the woman whose life he saved by giving her one of his kidneys, Sandy McCabe.

Sandy McCabe would love for dog handler Wade Koistinen to lead her fluffy black-and-white Havanese to victory in Madison Square Garden.

But for McCabe, even a Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club show would pale next to what Koistinen has already given her – one of his kidneys.

“I’m just happy to be alive for this,” McCabe said Friday at the Pennsylvania Hotel, surrounded by borzois, bloodhounds and scores of other dogs and owners, all checking in before the show begins on Monday.

McCabe, 49, who breeds Havanese with her husband, Kevin, in rural Iowa, has diabetes and was facing renal failure last summer before her friend Koistinen told her he would help.

“I could just see her getting sicker and sicker. I had to,” said Koistinen, 51, holding McCabe’s entry in the show, Rumor, an outgoing little 4-year-old whose full name is Ch. Heartland’s Rumor Has It.

“I couldn’t walk more than 10 feet,” said McCabe, who was told that it would be four to six years before she climbed to the top of a national waiting list for kidneys. None of her family members was healthy enough to donate one.

But Koistinen, who lives in Kansas City, volunteered. “He stepped forward and said, ‘I will give my kidney,’” McCabe said.

The pair underwent tests at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic last summer and found out that Koistinen was a perfect match. He persuaded doctors to do the transplant within a week.

Koistinen, who will first take to the ring with Rumor on Monday afternoon, seems modest about what he did. He lets McCabe do much of the talking, but proudly wears a green organ-donor wristband. McCabe had one too, until it had a run-in with one of her pups.

“My dogs chewed it,” she laughed.

epearson@nydailynews.com

A liquor store worker in Philadelphia said his boss gave him the “ultimate gift” this spring when he decided to give him a kidney, WFMZ-TV reported.

“He gave me the gift of life,” Rob Fenstermaker said of his boss, Brian DeAngelis.

DeAngelis said he decided to be Fenstermaker’s kidney donor after watching him get worse every day.

“We as a store noticed that he was getting sicker and sicker,” he said.

Other co-workers began talking about how they could help him. They discussed donating sick leave before talking about the possibility of a transplant.

Two co-workers tested but they were not a match.

Then DeAngelis decided to give it a shot.

“I kept passing all the tests,” he said.

Once he found out he was a match for Fenstermaker, he said he never looked back.

The surgery was in May, and both men say they are doing well and have developed a unique bond.

Fenstermaker said he’s grateful.

“He gave me the ultimate gift,” he said.

Brodey Flowers got the ultimate in birthday gifts from his grandfather, Mike Flowers of Danville.

Mike, 54, donated a kidney to Brodey in surgery Thursday, five days before the boy’s fourth birthday.

The surgery at The University of Alabama in Birmingham Hospital went well and even faster than doctors expected, though there were some post-surgery problems, said family friend Brenda Miller of Hartselle.

Brodey has already been moved to Children’s Hospital, while his grandfather was still at UAB.

“Brodey is doing great, but he’s still got a long road ahead,” Miller said.

The boy could be in the hospital four to six weeks, with a federal program handling much of his medical costs.

Miller is helping plan a benefit concert and silent auction for the Flowers.

“I just decided they needed some help,” said Miller. “There’s a lot of people out there who need help. It’s a lot of expense for all of them. I don’t know how many months Mike will be off work, and the little boy will be in the hospital until the doctors are satisfied with his progress.”

Brodey is the son of Bradley Flowers and Tabitha Flowers, and he has a 6-year-old brother, Brantley Flowers. Mike and Bradley were both working at Wolverine before the plant closed. Mike now works as a chemical operator at Daikin America.

“Brodey was born with problems that ruined his kidneys. One never worked, and there were some bladder problems, and we sort of knew this was coming,” said his grandfather.

Doctors wanted to put surgery off as long as they could, and they hadn’t had to put him on dialysis yet.

“The game plan is that my kidney will keep Brodey from needing dialysis,” said Mike. “We hope and pray this will do it, and if all goes as planned this should do him for 15 to 20 years. But as young as he is, he may need two kidney transplants in his lifetime.”

“But Brodey is a trooper — you couldn’t tell anything was wrong with him if you didn’t know it,” he said. “The funds will go for whatever is needed for him.”

by Rosa Flores / 11 News

Posted on November 17, 2009 at 8:22 AM

CONROE, Texas—A middle school reunion gave a Conroe man a second chance at life.

Travis McGuillian had open heart surgery, diabetes and kidney failure, so he thought his days were numbered. But after reuniting with some old middle school friends, he found more than just support—he found a friend willing to give up a kidney to save his life.

“It was a conviction. I felt a very strong need to find out if I could help,” said his donor, Daun Wade.

McGuillian and Wade were best friends during their middle school years. He played football, and she cheered for the team.

Back in 1974, they made a promise to each other that they never forgot.

“We made the agreement that if we had not found anyone to marry that we would marry each other,” said Wade.

“I always thought about her. I wondered if she was married or not,” said McGuillian.

Then life happened, and they lost touch.

Wade married someone else, and so did McGuillian.

About five months ago, they reunited, but McGuillian had some bad news for Wade.

“I found out about the open heart surgery, the dialysis, the diabetes,” said Wade.

She also learned about the kidney McGuillian needed to keep living. Wade said she felt a calling to give him her kidney. After months of tests, the two friends found out they were a perfect match.

“So I told him that as soon as he gets my kidney he’s going to have a female part so he’s going to start laughing at commercials,” said Wade.

The transplant is set for Tuesday, and their Facebook page is lighting up with messages. It’s also reminding them of a promise made long ago.

“This is what I had written in his annual back in 8th grade. Love ya forever… now you’re going to have a piece of me forever,” Wade said.

Wade will miss work for about 6 weeks while she recuperates from the surgery. McGuillian set up a Web site and hopes to raise enough money to cover his donor’s lost wages. If you’d like to help, just go to www.traviskidney.com.

Watch Video http://www.channelnewsasia.com/video/index.php
75-year-old grandma is Singapore’s oldest living organ donor

SINGAPORE: A 75-year-old grandmother has become Singapore’s oldest living organ donor. Madam Chee Leng Yin donated one of her kidneys to save her seriously-ill daughter.

They say nothing is stronger than the bond between a mother and her daughter.

When Madam Chee found out that she could save her daughter’s life by donating a kidney to her, she did not think twice.

She said: “It’s my kidney, it’s my daughter, who can stop me? Once I’ve decided, no one can stop me.”

46-year-old Shirley Lau suffered from end-stage kidney failure and needed a kidney transplant to lead a normal life. Even so, she had reservations about her mother’s sacrifice.

She said: “The feeling is quite complicated because in a way I’m worried, but in a way it is a solution for me. They (the doctors) went through a lot of tests. So based on that fact, we were more assured.”

Months after the surgery at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) in July, both mother and daughter are doing well.

Doctors say being too old to donate is a common misconception about organ donation. Evidence suggests that older healthy donors are not at a higher risk of surgical complications compared to younger donors.

So more older living donors above the age of 60 could be considered for surgery, if they are found to be mentally and psychologically suitable.

Doctors say that on average, the age difference between an older living donor and the recipient should be 10 to 20 years. But in Madam Chee and Shirley’s case, their age difference of nearly 30 years is an exception.

Dr Terence Kee, a consultant at SGH’s Department of Renal Medicine, said: “There was special consideration, based on the fact that Shirley’s mum’s kidney function is far beyond average expectation and also the fact that Shirley is a much smaller person who would benefit from receiving her mother’s kidney, which is … bigger in size.”

Studies have shown that the survival rate of up to five years is the same for all patients who receive kidneys from living donors, irrespective of whether the donors are young or old. In contrast, kidney patients who are on dialysis have a lower survival rate.

About 1,000 people in Singapore suffer from kidney failure every year. At present, over 500 people are on the waiting list for a kidney.

SGH carried out 10 living kidney transplants last year.

At 8:25 Thursday morning, Dr. Peter Schulam extracted a healthy kidney from a 60-year-old woman, slipped it into a bowl of sterile ice and wheeled it into the operating room next door. The donor, Nancy Seruto, a San Dimas mother, had never met the recipient, a 67-year-old retired flight attendant from Santa Ana.

Less than two hours later, Seruto’s husband was on the same operating table at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Another stranger, a 53-year-old Chatsworth mother of two, was giving him a kidney.

They were among 18 patients paired by surgeons as part of a rare transplant chain, built largely on trust.

Each link in the chain represents a paired donation in which a donor gives a kidney to a stranger, trusting that another stranger will donate a kidney to his or her loved one in return.

Such chains are difficult to build, because of the trust issues involved and medical complications. Donors and recipients must have compatible blood types and antibodies. Surgeons usually have to perform multiple transplants simultaneously in adjacent operating rooms, both to ensure that transplanted kidneys stay healthy and that donors do not get sick or back out, breaking the chain.

After Celia Contreras, 39, volunteered to donate her kidney to help a family friend as part of the UCLA chain, she said her husband pressured her not to, worried that their three children might one day need a kidney.

Contreras, an elementary school teacher, held her ground.

“I truly believe that what you put out there comes back to you,” she said.

For would-be recipients, donor chains can shorten the wait for a transplant by years, experts say. As of this month, 82,061 people nationwide were waiting for a kidney; 16,416 of them in California, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, based in Richmond, Va.

Network officials are developing a national registry that they plan to launch next year with five pilot sites, including UCLA. That could lead to an additional 1,000 to 2,000 kidney transplants annually, according to Dr. Bryan Becker, president of the New York-based National Kidney Foundation.

“It’s a huge opportunity to expand the donor pool,” said Dr. Jeffrey Veale, director of the UCLA Kidney Transplantation Exchange Program.

For now, donor pairs have to rely on smaller networks, including the National Kidney Registry in Babylon, N.Y., which two years ago started keeping a list of paired donors. UCLA surgeons used the registry to build the latest donor chain, their fifth and one of about a dozen the registry coordinated nationally this year, a spokesman said.

The chain started last year with Harry Damon, a firefighter in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Damon, 55, wanted to donate in memory of his 22-year-old son, who had died in a snowmobile crash. He contacted the registry looking to give his kidney to a young man.

Instead, he was matched with Sheila Whitney, 49, of Compton, a disabled teacher’s aide with lupus who had been waiting on dialysis for more than six years.

“I thought, ‘This is bound to be,’ ” Damon said.

He flew to Los Angeles for the chain’s first transplant June 8.

The same day, Whitney’s 27-year-old son, Reginal Griffin, donated to Keenan Cheung, 44, a USC housing manager and father of three from La Cañada Flintridge. Cheung’s wife, Jeanne, 43, who works at a Burbank production company, donated to Sonia Valencia, 29, a resource teacher in Commerce who is friends with Contreras.

Surgeons then had to coordinate with the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco to match Contreras with Priscilla “Pia” Miller, 36, of Fresno, a disabled bank teller, flying Contreras’ kidney to San Francisco for a transplant June 10.

Miller’s roommate’s brother, Anton Goodfriend, 25, of Springfield, Mo., an armored car driver, then flew to San Francisco in July to donate to Ross Bloom, 55, a real estate investor in Chatsworth. Bloom, who was incompatible with 97% of donors on most waiting lists, called the chain a miracle.

On Thursday, his wife of 34 years, Fern Bloom, donated to Joseph Seruto, 64, a business owner from San Dimas. Bloom had never been operated on before, but was giddy as she waited in a gown in the preoperative room. She called the chain “bashert,” Yiddish for “meant to be.”

Down the hall, Seruto’s wife, Nancy, a bookkeeper, was preparing to donate to retired flight attendant Donna Morrison.

The Serutos did not have to join the chain — they were compatible with each other. The couple, who have been married 37 years and have two grown children, chose to participate after their doctor suggested they could help Morrison, a former globe-trotting flight attendant who had been on dialysis for several years.

Late Thursday, Morrison’s fellow Continental flight attendant, Ellen Harmetz, 61, of West Los Angeles, donated to Phyllis Thompson, 54, of Simi Valley, a stay-at-home mom.

Thompson’s husband, Gregory, 56, a project manager at an architectural firm, is scheduled to make the last donation in the chain Tuesday.

Hospitals generally do not allow members of a transplant chain to meet before their operations, wary that they might back out.

UCLA surgeons allowed the first few pairs of the latest chain to meet at the hospital the day after the first batch of surgeries.

Griffin was surprised to discover his kidney had gone to an Asian man. He had assumed the recipient was white.

“I was amazed to see the line-up of the chain — all different ethnicities,” Griffin said.

The mood of the gathering reminded him of the atmosphere after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

“When people are really in need of help, we forget about the class system and race and really reach out,” he said. “It humbles you, the whole situation.”

His mother, who was still recovering, went in pajamas, rail thin, scars snaking down her arms from years of dialysis, determined to meet Damon.

Recalling that meeting this week, Whitney started to cry.

“I had went through so much,” she said, at home and back to her normal weight. “A lot of times I wanted to give up.”

Thursday’s pairs were also curious about each other. They eyed strangers in the hospital waiting room, trying to find their match.

“I would love the opportunity to thank them,” Thompson said.

They were all recovering well late Thursday, and are scheduled to meet for the first time at the hospital today.

–

James Love is a fit-looking man, but he was born with sickle cell anemia — recently it’s gotten so bad he’s suffered from chronic renal failure. He needed kidney dialysis three times a week. Out of work and on disability, he’d recently moved with his wife and their six children to a rental home in Sleepy Hollow, Illinois.

But on one eventful day, all he wanted was to stop the constant drip-drip-drip from the bathroom. So his wife spoke with their landlord, Barbara Thomas.

Thomas fixed the faucet. Then she gave him a new kidney. Seriously.

“My friend, she’s now my sister, Miss Barbara Thomas,” Love said. “She’s just a wonderful lady. She’s a wonderful lady.”

But Love didn’t believe her at first. Plenty of people are quick to offer their kidneys, James says, but very few follow through with the donation. Plus, his O-negative blood type is rare. Only one in 16 people in the United States have it, according to the Stanford School of Medicine. While living on dialysis for three years, James had watched 11 people in his situation die.

And although one of Love’s children and Thomas’s son had been friends for years, the two parents had never met before he moved in last December.

But Thomas was determined. “I had to ask him three or four times for the information on how to get tested,” said Thomas who, in addition to her landlord duties, works full-time as a legal secretary in Chicago. “I don’t think he believed I would really do it.”

But she did it almost nonchalantly.

“It was like I heard a voice saying in my head, ‘It is you.’ I didn’t really think about it. I just did it.”

Thomas, who just came home from the Loyola Medical Center in Maywood, says she’s still sore. She’s taking a six-week unpaid leave of absence to recover. Love is coming off his IV this week, and should go home thereafter.

“All I just know, I had to trust God,” Love said. “God will make a way for me to get a kidney. I don’t want to put it off on somebody and say, ‘Well, this person didn’t get tested,’ or ‘This person, you know, drew back,’ because the people that I’m surrounded with, they all love me. I have no doubt about that.”

For her part, Thomas is not stopping with just one donation.

Taking over a small fundraising operation James started called “Heal With Love,” Barbara filed for 501c non-profit status and she plans to start helping other families with medical bills associated with kidney transplants soon.

That’s just what this landlord does: helps families, one leaky faucet — and failing kidney — at a time..
First Published: Oct 26, 2009 12:22 PM CDT

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
……..

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Longtime co-workers Ceri McCarron and Betty Egwenike have shared stories about raising children, caring for ailing parents and their travels.

Now, they share an even stronger bond. McCarron recently donated a kidney to Egwenike, who was diagnosed with kidney disease several years ago and was on dialysis three days a week.

What makes their story even more compelling is that although the women worked together for more than 20 years and considered themselves workplace friends, they remained relative strangers outside the job.

“I think the conversations we’ve had in the last couple of weeks have been on a much deeper level,” said McCarron, 44, who lives in East Atlanta with her husband, two children and a menagerie of pets. “I never even had her phone number until I got it at the hospital.”

McCarron and Egwenike, 52, are now both home recuperating. The two, who work in the archives department of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library & Museum, were part of a living donation, which takes place when a living person donates an organ, or part of one. Usually, the donor is an immediate family member, such as a sibling, a child or a parent. But sometimes the donor can be a friend, co-worker or a more distant relative, according to the American Kidney Foundation.

In 2008, 5,967 of the 16,517 kidney transplants came from living donors.

More than 102,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for an organ transplant, according to the Virginia-based United Network for Organ Sharing. About three-fourths of people on the list are waiting for a kidney transplant.

Egwenike said several members of her family have high blood pressure or heart disease, so more than likely, she thought her donor would be a total stranger. Dr. Miguel Tan, who performed the surgery on McCarron at Piedmont Hospital, said the wait times are generally shorter for organs for living donors. There’s also less trauma to the organ, the outcomes are better and evaluations are done on living patients, so their health profiles are well-known.

But one day the two were talking about the transplant and hit on the subject of blood type. It turned out both shared the same blood type — O negative — and a seed was planted.

“She initiated it,” Egwenike said. The disease produces cysts in the kidneys and eventually causes the organs to deteriorate and stop functioning. By the time she was diagnosed, Egwenike said 55 percent of her kidney function was gone. “I was surprised she was actually going to do it. I was skeptical because you can change your mind at any time. I kind of stayed in the background because I didn’t want to be harassing her. I didn’t ask, it was out of her heart.”

It also surprised James A. Yancey Jr., an archivist at the Carter Library, who supervises both women.

“I am awed by this whole process,” he said. “I’m surprised anyone would do this. They’re not kin. They were friendly because they worked together, but they didn’t party together. I don’t think there was an association after work. She (McCarron) put into practice what a lot of people talk about and that’s love.”

As far as McCarron is concerned, it was the right thing to do. “I just knew … I’d seen her struggle with her health for a while and she always did it with such dignity,” she said. “I could tell she was doing what she needed to do to take care of herself, work, raise a daughter and a marriage.”

McCarron spent hours researching the process and went through several tests to determine if she was a match and if her kidneys were healthy. At first her husband, worried about the longtime implications on her health, wasn’t too keen on the idea, but he later came around.

“We both agreed that if something were to happen to Miss Betty, how could we live with ourselves knowing we have helped,” McCarron said.

Egwenike is thankful for the gift. She said she feels much better and has no doubt McCarron took good care of her kidneys.

“Yeah,” she said, laughing. “She drank a lot of water.”

Egwenike said her husband’s friends would like to have a mass in McCarron’s honor. “It was just a beautiful gift,” she said. “She’s an angel.”

“I don’t think it will be the way it was pre-surgery,” McCarron said of her friendship with Egwenike. “Where it leads, I don’t know. I’ll just let it unfold.”