3 County Recipients In 'Domino' Surgery

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3 County Recipients In 'Domino' Surgery
14 Patients Involved in Kidney Transplant

By Jen Beasley
Gazette Staff Writer
Thursday, August 13, 2009

When Lori Sough gave away the first stained-glass item she'd made, a delicate angel, it was a fitting token.

The stranger who received Sough's gift, Terry Bond of Mechanicsville, was an angel in her own right, having given Sough a kidney, and with it, a new shot at life.

"I had to give her something meaningful because she had given me something meaningful," Sough said.

The two met last week with other patients who had been part of a successful 14-patient "domino" kidney transplant conducted at Georgetown University Hospital in Northwest Washington in July.

An extensive effort allowed relatives and friends of patients who were willing to donate their organs but weren't medical matches with their loved ones to donate instead to compatible recipients. Bond donated a kidney to Sough that was not a match for Bond's sister Jacqueline. She received a kidney from Bryan Pinkard, the brother of Dachia Pinkard, a Takoma Park woman who received a kidney from someone else, and so on. Two donors who did not know any of the recipients also gave their kidneys.

All of the kidney recipients were from the Washington area, making it the largest such operation conducted in one area. The third Montgomery County recipient was Oluremi Adetosoye of Silver Spring.

Bond said she wanted to help her sister, but when she couldn't, coordinators discovered she was a match for Sough. Bond called the fact that she was a match with a woman she had not met "amazing."

"If I had known that, I'd have done that a long time ago," she said.

Although the two were strangers before the Aug. 5 event at the hospital, Bond's kidney now keeps Sough off dialysis, and Sough's angel hangs above Bond's bed.

"The real hero is Terry," said Sough, who is recuperating at home in Kensington and doing well since her July 20 operation. "It would have been impossible without her."

Pairing kidneys is a difficult task because the body produces antibodies that reject a donor kidney unless the same antibodies are present within it. The more transplants a patient has had, the more antibodies are present that could potentially reject an organ. Sough had undergone two transplants, and had about a 5 percent chance of finding a match.

"Your body fights it off -- no, you can't come in -- like little soldiers," Sough said.

The Georgetown University doctors used plasmapheresis, a process that lowers the level of antibodies that cause rejections, to make the domino transplant work. Hospital officials said they hope to use the technique to double the 250 transplants Georgetown performs annually by making transplantation between imperfect matches more successful.

Sough said she looks forward to living her life, instead of wondering how sick she'll be every day and spending endless hours in dialysis. She also wants to pick up making stained glass again, like her father, who loved making stained-glass crafts before his death.

Before the transplant, she said, "I was so sick you just go day by day, but now I have a future. I can look ahead."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081201556_pf.html