Kidney donor an 'amazing person'

[okarol]

Kidney donor an 'amazing person'

Friday, December 24, 2010 11:43 PM EST

By Susan Corica
Staff writer

“The woman that gave me her kidney is just this amazing person. She basically said ‘I have two kidneys. You need one. Here you go,’” said Vanessa Pannuto.

That woman is Maureen “Bean” Corcoran, from Weston. She was prompted to be a living organ donor because her 13-year-old son Will has cystic fibrosis.

Being involved with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, she heard about a 16-year-old boy with the disease who needed a new liver. She went through the testing, found out she was a match to donate part of her liver, but then learned her liver was not the proper shape to be divided safely.

“Once I had already been down that road I was interested in still donating. In the past year I had lost about 20 pounds so I feel really healthy, and my family is in good shape right now, so that’s when I decided I’ll donate a kidney to a stranger,” she said.

She met Pannuto at Yale-New Haven Hospital the day the transplants took place. “It was really nice to know I could help a young mother who had been through so much. It made it seem all the more important to do it,” Corcoran said.

Now about three weeks after the operation, “I feel really, really good, almost totally normal,” she noted.

In the meantime, she found out that the boy she originally was supposed to donate to ended up finding another donor, having his transplant, and is now doing well. “So it all worked out great,” she said.

Corcoran was not deterred from being a donor now by the thought that her son might need a transplant some day. For one thing, she might be too old to donate by the time Will needs it. For another thing, he has three sisters and 19 cousins, so there are many potential matches for him, she said.

She sees herself as setting an example. “I hope that if my son were to need something there would be a lot of people who had seen that I did this altruistically. They would be able to say ‘well if Bean was able to do it, then I want to try to help too.”

“I feel like I’m leading the way.” she concluded.

http://www.bristolpress.com/articles/2010/12/24/news/doc4d156e2222dc0742766931.txt