Woman donates kidney to man she met at the YMCA

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Last modified on 5/31/2009 at 12:13 am

Woman donates kidney to man she met at the YMCA
By DIANE COCHRAN
Of The Gazette Staff

A startling decision by a casual

acquaintance has added years and something far more

meaningful to Henry Graham's life.

A woman Graham met on the track at the Billings YMCA,

someone he chatted with while exercising but never saw outside the gym, gave him a kidney.

The organ transplant, performed in Denver earlier this year, means Graham does not need dialysis, a time-consuming and potentially risky procedure that uses a machine to clean toxins from the blood when the kidneys can no longer do it.

Nor did he have to wait the four years that most people who need a kidney wait to get one.

"There are kind people in the world despite all the vicious things that go on," Graham said.

Pam Rox's decision to donate one of her kidneys to a man she barely knew was rooted in a deep desire to help others and in a profound sense of loss. One of her co-workers at St. Vincent Healthcare had recently died from kidney disease.

"I didn't think the risk sounded that big," Rox said. "If you could save somebody's life, even if you had complications, it would be worth a try."

More than 100,000 Americans need an organ transplant. There are never enough donors.

Last year, organs from 14,000 people were transplanted into another person's body, according to Donate Life America. About 44 percent of them were from living donors.

The heart, lungs, kidneys, pancreas, liver, intestines and corneas can be transplanted.

Kidneys make up the majority of living donor transplants because a healthy adult can survive with just one. Still, only one-third of the 16,500 kidney transplants performed in the United States last year involved living donors.

Of those, the largest number of transplants were between family members, including spouses, said Dr. Phil Gauthier, medical director for the transplant program at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver.

"What is uncommon is people who don't have any previous emotional connection," Gauthier said.

Gauthier counts the Rox-Graham transplant in that category. Rox is among the few people who donate a kidney to an acquaintance. Fewer still offer a kidney to the next person on the transplant list and never know who got it.

For Rox, a nurse midwife, the decision to part with a kidney was easy.

"I think people who would be willing to donate a kidney would be practical and wouldn't think about it a lot," she said. "If you have to think about it a lot, you probably shouldn't do it. There are some things I have to think about a lot, and I don't do them."

Rox, 55, and Graham, 65, met seven years ago on the track at the Y.

He was walking, she was jogging, and both were socializing.

Over the years, Rox and Graham ran into each other a few times a week on the indoor loop. Although he never looked or acted sick, Graham at some point mentioned that he would eventually need a kidney transplant or dialysis.

He had learned at age 31 that he has polycystic kidney disease, a genetic disorder that causes cysts to grow on the kidneys and gradually reduces their function to life-threateningly low levels.

"I was mildly interested," Rox said. "But he seemed like he had it under control. He never acted like he needed anything."

After he retired from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Graham showed up at the Y less often because he and his wife, Sarah, were traveling.

It was during that time that Rox's co-worker, a postpartum nurse, died from kidney failure. The woman had been too sick for a transplant.

Rox was at her funeral when she first thought of donating a kidney to Graham.

When she suggested it to him the next time she saw him at the Y, Graham seemed embarrassed. Neither he nor his wife believed she meant it.

"I guess I was skeptical that it was real," Sarah Graham said. "I guess I was skeptical until I saw her down there" in Denver.

But Rox was serious. She submitted to a raft of testing, including a psychological evaluation, to determine if she was healthy enough to be a donor.

Her family was surprised by what she wanted to do, but they were supportive.

"We didn't in any way at all try to talk her out of it," said Rox's mother, Joyce Manning. "We raised our children to be giving and do what they can to help others."

"That's what we're here on Earth for - to help others," said Manning, who still lives in Rox's hometown, Copperas Cove, Texas.

Some people did question what Rox was doing. They wanted to know what would happen if her remaining kidney failed or if one of her children needed a transplant.

Rox's children are grown, and she is confident that, should one of them suddenly lose renal function, help will be available.

If she ends up needing a kidney, she will almost certainly get one. Kidney donors who later need a kidney are placed at the top of the transplant list.

Rox's left kidney was implanted in Graham's body on Jan. 7. The transplant was performed at Porter Adventist.

Graham's health insurance covered Rox's medical expenses, and Graham paid her travel costs. Graham is on Medicare, which pays for organ transplants.

It took two to three hours for a robot operated by a surgeon to remove her kidney. The laparoscopic procedure left her with three poke holes and one three-inch incision on her abdomen.

"It is still surgery, but it is not really big surgery," Gauthier said. "It's not like in the old days when you had to remove ribs and make a big back incision that took months to recover from."

The kidney was carried in a sterile bucket from Rox's operating room to Graham's, which was next door.

It would be too difficult to poke a donor kidney into the space created by removing one of the recipient's ailing kidneys, so Graham's kidneys were left in place.

Surgeons tucked Rox's kidney into his pelvis and connected it to an artery, a vein and the ureter, which is the line to the bladder. It took between four and six hours.

Technically, Graham has three working kidneys, but the two he was born with do very little. On the day of the transplant, his kidney function was 10 percent of normal.

Once connected inside Graham's body, Rox's kidney got right to work.

Nurses poured nine intravenous bags of fluid through Graham that night. It is not unusual for a kidney transplant recipient to produce as much as two gallons of urine in the hours after surgery.

"That kidney was like, 'Hey, I can finally do something! They turned me loose,' " Rox joked.

"There was 50 years of toxins in my blood, and here it was flushing them all out in one night," Graham said.

Actually, it took a little more than a week. Ten days after surgery, Graham's kidney function was normal. So was Rox's.

Five months later, she feels the same as she did before.

"I thought maybe it would feel like something was missing there, but it doesn't," she said.

Graham is also doing well. To prevent his immune system from rejecting Rox's kidney, he has to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of his life.

At first, he was taking 36 pills a day. Now he's down to 13. He is also wrestling with diabetes, a temporary side effect of the transplant.

Although he didn't think he felt sick before, he concedes that he feels better now. He's walking four miles a day and making plans to travel again with Sarah.

Rox's kidney, which will not be affected by Graham's polycystic kidney disease, has probably added a decade to his life. Kidney transplant recipients live an average of eight years longer than do people who are on dialysis, Gauthier said.

Graham's prognosis is especially good because his kidney came from a living donor. Kidneys from living donors perform better because they do not have to be put on ice and transported.

"It's kind of hard to answer, really, why she did it," Sarah Graham said. "It's hard to understand.

"We are so thankful for her generosity. It's overwhelming for us still."

Contact Diane Cochran at dcochran@billingsgazette.com or 657-1287.

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