In Taylor County, donors offer kidney for kidney

In Taylor County, donors offer kidney for kidney

* By Brian Bethel
* Abilene Reporter-News
* Posted December 7, 2010 at 10:30 p.m

Swapping out a kidney so that a friend or family member can receive a different one in return may seem novel or even strange.

But to Tara Mahoney, 20, and others like her, it represents a font of hope, a potential pool of donors that might lead to a long-awaited end to a life of ordeal.

The process is called kidney paired donation, requiring someone to donate a kidney on a patient’s behalf so that the patient can receive a compatible kidney in return from another donor.

The database-driven approach, advocates say, is potentially one of the best ways to boost live-donor transplants, and it provides a better chance of finding a donor for difficult-to-match transplant candidates.

“I was told that 98 percent of the kidneys that came in would not be a match for me, so I would be waiting a long time,” said Mahoney, who despite some recent setbacks is still hopeful that she will be able to use such a program to find a compatible kidney.

Right now, 29 people are on the United Network for Organ Sharing’s national waiting list for a kidney in Taylor County and ZIP codes that include Buffalo Gap, Dyess Air Force Base, Lawn, Merkel, Ovalo, Trent, Tuscola and Tye.

A national kidney paired donation created last month through UNOS is expected to result in an extra 2,000 to 3,000 transplants a year, according to a recent story by The Associated Press.

Speaking Tuesday afternoon, Ciara Samana, assistant director for policy with UNOS, said that such systems work best when there are large numbers of people in them.

While there have been a few paired liver donations, “the demand for a national system just isn’t there,” Samana said.

But there is demand for kidneys, she said, and reaction to the program has been positive so far.

UNOS has been looking at the possibility of a national system for some time, Samana said, meeting with existing paired donation programs about three years ago.

“Having end-stage renal failure is a terrible thing, and a lot of people who have felt helpless to help someone they care about now have an option,” she said. “The mood is definitely one of collaboration.”

Care is taken, said UNOS spokeswoman Anne Paschke, to make sure that people are in no way defrauding the system.

A scenario, she said, where someone paid people to flood the database in the hope of finding a match for a loved one was unlikely, she said.

“If one (potential donor) has been accepted, then you’re in with that one,” she said. “You wouldn’t keep screening someone to be your living donor.”

Potential living donors are evaluated to make certain that not only are they physically and mentally capable of being a donor, but that they are “doing it for the right reasons,” Paschke said.

“You’ve got people looking out for that kind of thing,” she said. “Also, the transplant center gets someone to sign some things saying that they’ve been notified that it’s against the law to buy or sell a kidney in the United States.”

The 1984 National Organ Transplant Act made the sale of organs for transplant purposes illegal, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

And the system helps even those who don’t come to the table with a living donor, she said, because it reduces the number of people waiting for organs from all sources.

Kidney paired donation programs, in particular, can benefit people who are highly “sensitized,” those who can’t get a transplant from a large percentage of the population.

“Perhaps they’ve been previously transplanted, or they’re sensitized from pregnancy,” Paschke said. “So it’s especially promising if we can get some of the highly-sensitized people transplanted.”

Mahoney, whose kidney issues were diagnosed before she was even born, is one of those — and obviously, highly in favor of the approach. Currently, her health requires her to take dialysis treatments three times a week.

She has had people step forward willing to be donors so that she can swap if a potential donor is found, though in each case there have been setbacks.

One would-be donor, during the screening process, was diagnosed with cancer — though the family actually considers that a blessing, she said, since the person was able to be successfully diagnosed and treated.

Her sister offered to donate one of her kidneys but is a different blood type, she said, and of a variety — Type B — that is harder to match, Mahoney said.

Mahoney’s physician in San Antonio found a potential match for her and a match for her sister’s kidney, she said.

But that time, her own possible match hit a snag, and the surgery had to be canceled about a week before it was to happen.

Currently, her physician thinks now that he has found an even better match for her, she said, though she is now back to needing a donor to offer a kidney in kind.

“Now, what we’re looking for is people with O blood types or A blood types,” she said. “O is universal, and As are a lot easier to match than Bs.”

Despite the setbacks, Mahoney, who plans to transfer to Hardin-Simmons University and, given time, become a teacher, believes that she will ultimately get things to line up in her favor.

Her mother, Julia Humphrey, is hopeful, too, saying that if a donor can be found, her daughter could have a transplant in January.

Mahoney herself said that she has great respect for all people who are organ donors, whether they choose to donate a live organ or to donate after their deaths.

She said more people in Texas should consider becoming organ donors.

Texas recently has ranked last in organ donor enrollees, according to the website of Donate Life America, a group that assists in mobilizing the transplant community to educate the American public about organ, eye and tissue donation and motivate them to register as donors.

“I think it’s great for someone to unselfishly do that,” Mahoney said. “I’m an organ donor myself. When I pass away, I want my hair, my teeth, my eyes, anything to go to help someone. You’re giving life, that’s how I see it.”

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