Mom gives daughter life -- twice

[okarol]

Mom gives daughter life -- twice
Childhood infection began destruction of woman's kidneys much later in life
 
Derek Spalding
Daily News

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Ruth Whelan donated a kidney to her daughter Cindy Gordon 23 years ago. She has lived twice as long as doctors expected at the time.
CREDIT: Derek Spalding/Daily News
Ruth Whelan donated a kidney to her daughter Cindy Gordon 23 years ago. She has lived twice as long as doctors expected at the time.

When Cindy Gordon was nine-years-old a strep infection gave her a sore throat. She soon got better but 10 years later she got strep again, setting off a chain reaction in her body that would eventually cause her kidneys to fail.

Doctors now speculate that the infection Gordon had when she was nine likely snuck into her kidney and remained dormant for a decade, until strep throat struck again when she was about 19. That's when the sleeping infection awoke and went to work, although no one realized it at the time.

Gordon soon married and during her first pregnancy, doctors finally detected her failing kidney. They told her she may not survive another pregnancy, but the couple soon had a second child, Darrin. Two years later, doctors implanted a tube just below her belly button, which allowed her to fill and drain her abdomen with fluids to remove harmful waste and excess salt from her blood. Her kidneys no longer did the work.

The young mother spent the first three-and-a-half years of Darrin's life on peritoneal dialysis. She changed the fluid in her body four times a day for those three years, waiting for a donor to give her the kidney she needed to stay alive.

Without a new organ, doctors would have to switch Gordon to hemodialysis, which would mean three trips to the hospital each week. Doctors would have had to drain a few ounces of blood at a time from one wrist, filter it through a dialysis machine and return it through a vein in her other wrist. But Gordon likely wouldn't have survived anyway.

She had little time. Her four sisters and her mother underwent testing to see if they could offer up one of their kidneys. The chances of survival would be far greater if the organ came from a family member, but live donors were rare a quarter of a century ago.

"Live donors were relatively uncommon back then, especially in B.C. where people were not keen on the procedure," said Paul Keown, head of the nephrology division at the University of British Columbia. "Now we're one of the leading areas in North America in terms of the number of procedures done here. Two-thirds of transplants are from living donors."

Fortunately, Gordon was approved for the transplant when her mother, Ruth Whelan, came up with the best match - 80%.

"I had just lost a brother-in-law to the same thing," Whelan recalled this week. Hemodialysis treatment was too much for him and he died of a heart attack.

"When they said they were going to do that to (my daughter), I said no way. If there was any possible way, I would give her mine."

Twenty three years ago, doctors wheeled them into surgical rooms next to one another. "I can still see them working on her. It's a picture I'll never forget," Gordon said.

"They wheeled me in on the gurney and I looked through the little window and saw them preparing her for surgery."

Surgeons cut Whelan from her stomach around to the middle of her back, "nearly in half," she recalls, in order to remove her largest kidney so the Nanaimo mother gave life to her daughter for the second time.

http://www.canada.com/nanaimodailynews/news/story.html?id=4aae7048-3a38-4759-b638-deacb90d40ba