N.J. 1-year-old girl becomes youngest recipient in kidney donation chain

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N.J. 1-year-old girl becomes youngest recipient in kidney donation chain
By Amy Ellis Nutt/The Star-Ledger
February 13, 2010, 7:36AM

HACKENSACK -- The large white box had flown more than 2,500 miles on the red-eye from San Francisco wedged into the baggage compartment of a Boeing 737. When it finally landed in Newark at 6:43 this morning, the delivery was already 20 minutes behind schedule.

Inside the Continental Airlines office, Ruben Lambert, nervously checked his Blackberry. Finally, a little after 7 a.m., a truck that had been dispatched to the tarmac, pulled up to the office with the priority package. Juggling two boxes, the delivery man jumped out, letting the top one tumble to the ground.

"Oh my God, that’s not the kidney is it?" Lambert asked, a look of horror crossing his face.

It wasn’t, and within minutes a much-relieved Lambert, an organ procurement specialist from the NJ Sharing Network, was speeding the kidney to Hackensack University Medical Center.

By noon Friday, 1-year-old Payton Dimick of Lake Hopatcong had become the world’s youngest participant in a chain of paired kidney exchanges between computer-matched donors and recipients.

    Related coverage:

    Chain of Life: A three-part multimedia series published by The Star-Ledger in June detailed a six-way kidney donation chain

    • Part 1: A gift of hope unfolds

    • Part 2: A dozen surgeries in 36 hours

    • Part 3: Donors and recipients meet

"We just want her to grow up happy and healthy," said Jason Dimick, Payton’s 31-year-old father, the night before the operation. Not only would his daughter receive a kidney from a total stranger, Dimick, a police officer, would donate one of his to a stranger in return.

More than 83,000 Americans in need of new kidneys currently languish on a deceased-donor waiting list. In the past, the only opportunity for these patients to receive a living-donor organ, which has twice the survival rate of a deceased kidney, was from a friend or relative who was compatible in both blood and tissue type. But the difficulty in making such matches, has meant that many who are willing to give have ultimately been unable to donate.

Three years ago, the odds of making these difficult and complex matches were greatly enhanced when Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore pioneered an innovation: What if all those people who were not matches for their loved ones, agreed, instead, to donate a kidney to a stranger so that their friend or relative could receive a kidney in return?

In theory, these serial acts of kindness could keep a chain going forever. Creation of a change can only work with a large pool of incompatible donor/recipient pairs, and sophisticated software capable of sifting through billions of possible combinations in order to make matches.

Enter Garet Hil of the National Kidney Registry in Babylon, N.Y., whose computer arranged Friday’s chain of four donors and four recipients from three states.

Payton is not only the registry’s youngest recipient, but one of its sickest. The plump, blue-eyed baby girl was born without incident in April 2008. Three weeks later, however, what appeared to be a flu was instead the first sign of renal failure. Tests revealed Payton suffered from a combination of genetic diseases. Her kidneys were removed at five months old and she was put on dialysis, with a tube in her stomach cleaning her blood 12 hours a day.

Because of her age and illness, Payton was pushed to the top of the deceased-donor waiting list -- kidneys are one organ that can be transplanted from adults to children -- but three days after a transplant last year she experienced a vicious rejection, and was back on dialysis.

For Payton, the gift of a new kidney has meant another chance at a normal life.

"We were ready to go through any avenue," said her father, who was not a match for his daughter, but who quickly agreed to donate on her behalf. "This was the next thing, and if it was going to be anybody, I wanted it to be me."

For Hackensack University Medical Center, the transplant was a stepping stone.

"This is our first chain," said Michael Shapiro, head of the hospital’s department of organ transplantation. "One kidney is going from UCLA to UCSF (University of California San Francisco Medical Center). One from UCSF is coming to Hackensack. One from Hackensack goes to UCLA and then the final one goes from UCLA to Nevada."

By this afternoon, Payton and Jason Dimick had both sailed through their surgeries. "They’ve been hoping and praying for this for awhile," said Joan Abrams, the manager of Hackensack’s organ transplant division. "Hopefully this will start their life over again."

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/02/nj_youngest_kidney_donation_ch.html