What’s a spare kidney between good friends?

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What’s a spare kidney between good friends?

By Bryan McKenzie

Published: June 5, 2008

Once upon a time a true friend would give the shirt off his back, but Ann Hanna has raised the stakes.

She’s giving a kidney.

This morning, Hanna, 55, of New Hope, is scheduled to have doctors at the University of Virginia Medical Center remove one kidney and place it in Michael “Tommy” Eavers, 50, of Verona. The two have been friends for 14 years, since Hanna moved to the Shenandoah Valley from Colorado.

“I’m not sure exactly why I’m doing it, except that Tommy needs it,” Hanna said, sitting in the UVa hospital cafeteria before undergoing a last-minute battery of tests. “It’s not something I ever thought of before I found out that Tommy needed one. I know that Tommy and his wife, Kaye, have been real good friends to me, and he deserves this chance.”

Eavers owns a laundry in Verona. Energetic, fit and otherwise healthy, he’s been a diabetic since age 21 and on dialysis since 2006.

“There are a lot of people who say they’ll give you a kidney, but when it comes down to it they back out and I can understand that,” Eavers said. “[Transplant donation] requires a major operation and I wouldn’t accept it if there was chance that anything bad would happen to Ann. Even though I want to get this kidney, I wanted to make sure she knew it was OK if she decided not to do it, but she’s hung in there with me.”

It may seem strange that someone would volunteer to have an important internal organ removed for installation in someone else, but UVa transplant officials say about 50 percent of their kidney transplants come from living donors.

“It’s been a major source of transplant organs since the 1960s,” said Anita Sites, living donor transplant coordinator at UVa’s Medical Center. “It makes a big difference because there are about 70,000 people on the waiting list for a kidney and not enough kidneys to go around.”

Sites said the hospital performs a kidney transplant about once every three days, conducting 100 last year. Fifty of those transplanted organs came from volunteers.

“Having a living donor cuts down on the waiting time. The average wait for a kidney from a deceased donor is about five years,” Sites said. “Not everyone on dialysis can last that long and the sooner a donor is found, the better for the recipient.”

Transplant operations require lots of prodding, poking and testing before the knife goes down. Blood types, tissue types and other types must match. Participants are screened physically and emotionally. It’s all to make sure that the limited resource — the kidney — is given freely and has an excellent chance of being successful in its new body.

In fact, Eavers had to receive a quadruple bypass before he could receive a new kidney.

“I’m in good shape. I felt fine and I passed a stress test with absolutely no problem, but the folks at UVa wanted to run one more test and I figured, fine,” Eavers recalled. “Turned out I had three arteries with 80 percent blockage and one with 90 percent blockage. I didn’t know it, but I would have been one of those guys that’s out working one day and comes home and dies from a heart attack.”

The heart surgery was good practice, Eavers said: “They told me the kidney transplant was nothing compared to the heart surgery. That’s good.”

For most people, friendship’s limits would end at the point of a scalpel. That’s not the case with Hanna. Having spent her childhood in Colorado and Alaska, Hanna survived a deadly earthquake in the northern state in the early ’60s. When she moved to Virginia, however, she found it nearly futile to assimilate.

“It was a little tough fitting in at first, and Tommy and his wife, Kate, were among the first people I met. I went in to wash some clothes and we just hit it off. They’ve always been there to help me and I always said I’d help them out whenever I could. Of course, I didn’t really expect this,” she laughed.

Hanna’s husband, Bob, has backed her in the decision, making sure she looked at all the details, including three weeks off work and possible health risks.

“It’s going to have some impacts on me, but the bottom line is I can live fine with one kidney and Tommy needs one,” Ann Hanna said.

“Besides,” she laughed, “this way he can never say that I never gave him anything.”


http://www.dailyprogress.com/cdp/news/local/article/whats_a_spare_kidney_between_good_friends/22971