Local woman in Rose paradeBy Robyn Lydick
Published: 12.22.08
Mandy Trollinger has special New Year’s plans. The Highlands Ranch resident will be in Pasadena on a float in the Tournament of Roses parade, promoting organ donation, along with 25 others.
Trollinger had two kidney transplants, one at 14, with a kidney supplied by her mother, and one in 2005 from a deceased donor, a 19-year-old woman named Alicia.
Trollinger started taking Prednisone at age 8, and gained weight and dealt with chronic pain. By junior high, she looked emaciated and people she thought were friends turned away from her.
Middle school in Texas can be a difficult place if you are different in any way. Needing surgery to save your life is definitely different.
But her mother’s kidney gave her quality of life long enough for her to complete school, earn a master’s degree in nutrition, marry and move to Oklahoma, then Colorado.
Trollinger worked as a renal dietician, helping kidneys disease patients on dialysis cope with the low fluid and low salt diets needed.
In 2000, she was in chronic rejection of her mother’s kidney.
Between 2002 and 2003, she needed 13 units of blood for anemia from her anti-rejection drug. Another transplant was her only hope.
She spent 13 months on dialysis herself.
“It’s a full time job,” she said. “You drive yourself there, spend four hours on the machine and you are exhausted.”
Trollinger has known patients who would rather stay on dialysis than risk a surgery. One woman had been on dialysis for 20 years. She feared more bad reactions to medications.
She got her second transplant April 19, 2005.
Trollinger has had a little contact with Alicia’s father.
She wrote her story for use on Astellas Pharmaceutical’s Web site, transplantexperience.com as part of a contest Ride of a Lifetime.
Trollinger hopes that the float will make potential organ donors aware of the need for organs.
One area where education from donation networks has fallen flat is Hispanic and African American communities, two communities where diabetes and hypertension increase the likelihood of kidney failure.
Myths and fears abound about donation.
A recent trial of a transplant surgeon in California highlighted the need for firm boundaries in patient care.
Dr. Hootan Roozrokh was aquitted by a San Louis Obispo jury.
Prosecutors claimed Roozrokh prescribed drugs to hasten the death on an emaciated heart patient.
Roozrokh was not the patient’s doctor but had flown in from San Francisco as part of a transplant team.
Roozrokh said in court that he stepped in to offer the patient pallative care for his pain.
He was in to harvest organs in a situation called donation after cardiac death, which is new and needs rigid standards of care, according to prosecutors.
The patient died, but his organs were not harvested.
This isolated, and perhaps only, case of a transplant surgeon getting involved with patient care brings up deep seated fears of ghoulish doctors hurrying death.
“The procurement team is never involved with patient care,” Trollinger said.
Meanwhile, people with organ failure are waiting.
In Colorado, 1,843 people are waiting for organs, mainly kidneys. Nationwide, 100,777 people wait, 82,959 of them for kidneys, and 2,326 for a kidney and pancreas transplant.
Trollinger urges people to get the organ donor heart on their license and tell their families about their decision.
Families can override a donor mark on a license if the person dies in hospital.
For more information about organ donation, visit
www.donor-awareness.org.
“Transplants give people chances at normal lives, families and careers,” Trollinger said.
http://coloradocommunitynewspapers.com/articles/2008/12/23/highlands_ranch_herald/news/25_rl_kidney_hr.txt
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