Kidney transplant pioneer is honored (Transplant lasted 38 years)

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Kidney transplant pioneer is honored

Web Posted: 01/17/2008 12:19 AM CST

Don Finley
Express-News

In 1970, when organ transplants were still uncommon enough to raise eyebrows, a Chicago interior decorator named Joan Glicksman returned to her native San Antonio with failed kidneys and long odds.

Surgeons at the Mayo Clinic, where she had been hospitalized, refused to operate on her. A childhood case of rheumatic fever had damaged her heart. But San Antonio doctors, eager to launch a kidney transplant program, thought it was worth a try.

On Wednesday, on what would have been the 38th anniversary of her transplant, the local transplant community gathered to honor Joan Glicksman Wish, who died Nov. 4 at age 77, her replacement kidneys still working fine.

"It was other parts of her body, not her kidneys, that failed," said Dr. Michael Lichtenstein, her primary care doctor.

"She had one of the most perfect results of kidney transplantation I've ever seen," said Dr. J. Bradley Aust, emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center, who performed the transplant at the then-Bexar County Hospital on Jan. 16, 1970.

Although Wilford Hall Medical Center had transplanted kidneys since the first anti-rejection drug, Imuran, was approved in 1963, it was the first successful transplant in a San Antonio civilian hospital.

Aust, who had done the procedure in Minnesota, had transplanted a kidney into a San Antonio man before Wish. He died of a heart attack a short time later.

Wish was a bit famous because she received two kidneys rather than one.

"This was before we were able to share organs with other centers," said Dr. Marvin Forland, a kidney specialist who treated her for 30 years until he retired from the faculty of the health science center. "Rather than throwing away a kidney, we elected to provide her with both surgically."

Her donor was a young man who died in an auto accident, whose wife agreed to give his kidneys to others.

"I'm still very sorry that he had to lose his life so that I could continue mine," Wish told the Express-News in 2002. "I don't know that I would be here today without that surgery."

Wish continued her career as an interior designer in San Antonio, launching the Blue Frog firm. But she will be remembered for a lifelong commitment to comforting patients, promoting organ donation and accepting the role of "poster girl for transplantation in our community," Forland said.

Today, San Antonio's three kidney transplant programs — University, Methodist Specialty and Transplant and Christus Santa Rosa hospitals — have 2,507 people on their waiting lists for kidneys.

One of those is Emery Yeager, 63. In 1967 when he was a young soldier in Vietnam, three enemy bullets hit him, destroying one of his kidneys. The Army doctor was encouraging.

"I remember it vividly. He said you can live for 40 years with the one kidney you got," Yeager said, adding that's just about how long it lasted. He went on the waiting list at University Hospital in early 2006.

While he waits, he undergoes dialysis at Brooke Army Medical Center three times a week. If he's hopeful, it's because he remembers when two former transplant patients spoke to him early on about what to expect — a process that Wish began 38 years ago.

"It opened up my eyes to see what I would be in store for if I ever got a kidney," he said.

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