Melissa Foster seeks kidney on Facebook to replace failing transplant

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Burton woman Melissa Foster seeks kidney on Facebook to replace failing transplant

Published: Thursday, June 10, 2010, 6:25 PM   

Laura Misjak | The Flint Journal


BURTON, Michigan — Melissa Foster doesn’t have another nine years to wait for a new kidney.

So she’s turned to Facebook to find one.

The 30-year-old Burton woman is living off a kidney transplant she received five years ago from a cadaver — a transplant she waited nine years for.

Now that her body is rejecting the kidney, she needs a new one but was told she’d have to wait even longer on the donor registry because it’s more difficult to match kidneys in patients who already have received transplants.

“I really just started getting desperate,” Foster said. “I read a story about a man who put something to that effect on his Facebook page, and his mayor donated a kidney to him.”

Since creating the “Mel needs a kidney” group on Facebook three weeks ago, the page had drawn nearly 1,100 members as of Wednesday night.

The page is plastered with messages from friends and strangers asking how to get tested and encouraging Foster to keep her spirits up.

Potential donors need to have Foster’s blood type — O-positive — and then have to be tested at a hospital to see if they could be a match.
 
Of the nearly 3,000 people in Michigan waiting for organ donations, about 2,400 need a kidney, said Betsy Miner-Swartz, communications specialist for Gift of Life Michigan.

The Facebook approach is an unusual way to reach out to potential donors, she said.

“You do hear about people donating organs to total strangers — it’s certainly not unheard of,” Miner-Swartz said. “People generally want to do good, so she might have some luck there.”

Foster began having problems with her kidneys when she was 16 after a urinary tract infection backed up to her kidneys, causing them to fail.
 
Foster started dialysis treatments at 16 and received her transplant when she was 25.

In September, she learned her body was rejecting the kidney and said its function has dropped from about 80 percent to 24 percent.

She now takes 30 to 35 pills a day for problems related to her kidney function.

Foster suffers from an enlarged heart, muscle weakness and other complications from her first nine years on the treatment and worries about what could happen if she goes on dialysis.

“It’s a pretty high risk that I will (die), being that there’s so many complications with dialysis,” she said.

Foster isn’t the only person who’s looked to strangers to save a life — there are stories of people finding donors on Facebook, Craigslist and classified ads.

Chayla Lipschutz of New York said she has answered newspaper ads for people seeking kidney donors and tested for seven people before finding she was a match in 2005.

“I liked the idea of saving a life,” Lipschutz said. “I’ve been wanting to do more.”

Since donating, Lipschutz has taken on her own project of helping others find kidneys. The New Yorker has been featured on NPR, ABC news and CNN for her work in finding matches.
“It’s not for everybody,” she said of kidney donations. “For me, it wasn’t a big deal. Some other kidney donors would agree with me.”

Michele Zamora, an independent living-donor advocate for a Texas-based nonprofit, The Living Bank, said major transplant centers go through mental and physical screening processes with organ donors.

Kidneys are among the most common organ donations but also among the most in demand, Zamora said, with about 85,000 of the 106,000 people needing organs searching for kidneys.

“I know people who have successfully found donors on Craigslist,” she said. “But it’s open to the entire universe, so nobody is really monitoring what responses you get.”

Zamora likened the Facebook approach to looking for donors at church or the workplace.

“Instead of making an announcement from the pulpit or work bulletin, it’s in a Facebook bulletin,” she said.

If the Facebook method doesn’t pan out, Foster said she might move to another state where the wait for a kidney would be shorter, she said.

“I’m just hoping that one of the people that gets tested is a match,” she said.

A Citizens Bank trust fund has been set up to help offset Foster’s medical bills. The trust is called the Melissa R. Tuff fund, Foster’s name before a divorce.

Staff writer Allison Bush contributed to this report.

http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2010/06/burton_woman_melissa_foster_se.html