Merrick family gives thanks for kidney donation

Newsday.com

Merrick family gives thanks for kidney donation

BY NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON

nia.henderson@newsday.com

11:23 AM EST, November 26, 2007

The e-mail arrived at 10:52 p.m. on Feb. 16, and with four sentences the Dillons' lives were forever changed.

It was from a woman named Lisa and read, in part: "I . . . saw your flier looking for a kidney donor. While this is nothing that I had ever (seriously) considered, I am an organ donor and figured why wait 'til I'm dead."

The family's story first appeared in Newsday a year ago, and at that point they were poised to accept a kidney from a man who had come forward. But a few weeks after the article ran, his donation was nixed for medical reasons.

The Dillons tacked up fliers about their daughter's plight, and after seeing one at a tax preparer's office, Lisa offered a kidney. Her donation saved Alice Dillon's life.

"There's really nothing you can say to a person like that," said father Marty Dillon, 79, of Merrick. "She knew what she was doing for us and we knew what she was doing . . . It just brings me to tears."

Lisa, who lives in New Jersey, did not respond to several phone calls for comment, although the Dillons have kept in touch with her.

In November 2005, doctors found that Alice Dillon had declining kidney function.

Family members were tested, but no suitable donors were found.

So the Dillons cast a wider net, designing a Web site, posting fliers and telling folks about their daughter's plight. "For the whole year, it consumed us," Sue Dillon, 72, said.

Their campaign worked.

Strangers from as far away as Australia responded with offers.

On the day after Christmas last year, the family began chronicling the phone calls and e-mails they received in a red spiral notebook.

On Feb. 16, they found their match, their lifeline, in Lisa.

On June 13, after several rounds of tests, Dillon wrote: "She passed the tests and can go forward."

June 23: "Lisa called, all OK."

The surgery was scheduled for Sept. 5, just after Alice Dillon's 40th birthday.

The family had a pre-surgery/birthday party in their backyard.

A bigger celebration began when they went to Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla on the day of the surgery. "When we went there and I saw her sitting there, I knew we were home," Marty Dillon said.

On Sept. 5, he wrote: "Transplant successfully completed."

Groggy for hours after the surgery, Alice Dillon said she "wondered if it were real or not" when she finally came around. "I was excited, happy, ecstatic," she recalled.

Alice, a food service worker at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, recently moved into her own apartment and she says her doctors say her prognosis is good.

And the Dillons say they are still getting phone calls about kidney donations, and they encourage others to become organ donors.

"Lisa is healthy, Alice is healthy and Lauren, we felt like she was a friend," Sue Dillon said, referring to Lauren Terrazzano, the late Newsday reporter who wrote the story about Alice on Nov. 25, 2006. "With her decision to write about us . . . she lives on."

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-lidill1127,0,5520145.story