Donation for dad — and others

Donation for dad — and others

Web Posted: 02/07/2010 12:00 CST

The first time Taneva Pitts offered to donate a kidney for her father, she was 5 and not quite in kindergarten.

But Taneva was far too young, and her grandmother turned out to be a good match instead, donating a kidney that lasted nearly a decade before Taneva's father, Randy Davies, had to resume dialysis in October 2007.

So, last year, Taneva offered again.

This time, she was 18 and a senior in high school — old enough to be taken seriously but younger than the typical donor. At Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital, where Taneva and her father had their surgeries about a week ago, doctors have performed thousands of kidney transplants, but hospital records show just a handful of living donors Taneva's age.

“God has blessed me with a daughter that has given me life,” Davies said after his surgery.

But Taneva's kidney didn't actually go to her father. A database matched her kidney with another recipient and someone else's willing donor with Davies. On the day of the surgery, three donors and three recipients swapped kidneys.

“This is a particularly special case,” said Davies' surgeon, Francis Wright. “She's making it possible to get two other people off the transplant list.”

Before the surgeries, in side-by-side hospital beds, Taneva fingered her father's hospital bracelet quietly while he told her what to expect in the operating room: the cluster of people, the bright lights.

“Now don't let that scare you,” he said.

Taneva's father received his first donor kidney after complications with a medication used in dialysis caused bleeding around his brain. That kidney failed in 2007, hastened by Davies' reluctant rationing of pills after Medicare stopped paying for anti-rejection medications, said his nephrologist, Melissa Isbell. Changes to regulations mean Davies won't have that problem again, she said.

His sons, both in the Navy and helping with relief efforts in Haiti, offered kidneys, as did his wife and oldest daughter. No one was a match.

“He was in a position where he'd probably win the lottery before he got a compatible donor kidney,” said Wright, director of the abdominal organ transplant program, the day before the surgery. “Taneva is probably the only chance he has to be transplanted.”

By the time she was tested, the kidney exchange program offered new hope.

In the operating room, Wright carefully prepped Davies' donor kidney, quietly trimming away pale, yellow fat from the organ as Bobby Darin sang “Mack the Knife” over the stereo.

Directly across the hall, surgeon Sammy Vick removed Taneva's left kidney with laparoscopic technology, using long tools that had been inserted through small incisions in her torso. Her kidney was pulled quickly through the largest incision, near her navel, and whisked away.

Laparoscopic surgery means a faster recovery, but Taneva still went through a lot to donate a kidney, including blood tests, urine tests and evaluations to determine whether her motives were sincere.

She expects to miss about two weeks of school, and she had to forgo her senior year on the track team.

Students at Sam Houston High School wondered why she would do it.

“They were so amazed,” Taneva said. “I was like, ‘Why you so amazed?'”

Taneva's decision could add an estimated 10 years to her father's life, doctors say.

After the surgery, Davies woke up in the intensive care unit on the hospital's first floor, his new kidney hard at work.

Upstairs, Taneva was asking about her dad.

“How's Daddy?” she murmured as soon as she saw her mother and two younger sisters.

“He's OK,” said Taneva's mother Andrea Pitts. “He loves you.”

“Can I see my stomach?” the teenager asked next. “Do I look bad?”

Sunday evening, Davies was released from the intensive care unit and wheeled upstairs to the second floor. When the doors opened, Taneva was padding slowly down the hall with her grandmother.

Taneva beamed.

“I think I move faster than you,” Davies said, as a nurse wheeled him down the hall. “You better keep up.”

Sitting next to one another in their hospital gowns and matching blue socks, father and daughter compared notes on their surgeries.

“Can you eat solids?” Taneva wanted to know. “Are you in pain?”

The entire family remarked about the glow on her face once her father was in the room.

The new transplant not will only improve Davies' quality of life, but will change things for the whole family. No more racing back from a weekend away in time for dialysis first thing Monday or scouting out out-of-town dialysis centers. Before the surgery, Davies sold some used cars, but spending three days a week on dialysis made it tough to work a stable job.

Within minutes of his release from the intensive care unit, Davies declared his plans to return to college.

As for Taneva, she's still waiting to hear from a few schools, but she received an acceptance letter from Texas State University three days before the surgery.

Her application included an essay about kidney donation and her father, in whom Taneva said she found inspiration.

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