Ailing man uses Web to seek kidney donor

Posted on Mon, Jan. 08, 2007

Ailing man uses Web to seek kidney donor

Almost 70,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for kidney transplants

By CLAUDIA MELENDEZ SALINAS
Herald Salinas Bureau

Gonzales resident Angel Tejeda has been on a waiting list to receive a kidney transplant for four years.

The last time he went to the transplant center in San Francisco, he was told he had at least another three to go.

"This is a very tiring experience," the 45-year-old said. "You go to the machine ever other day, and you come out weakened and feeling ill. I'm anxious to have a transplant to get my life back to normal."

Last year, Tejeda embarked on a solo quest to increase awareness about organ donation among his friends and neighbors. Part of the problem he saw was a lack of knowledge and taboos about letting relatives know whether you want your organs to be donated when you die.

But after his story was published in the newspaper, a reader called with another idea. Why not look for a living donor?

"There's this Web page where you get connected people like me with others who are donors," Tejeda said. "Supposedly, the connection is really quick."

Tired of years of waiting for an organ to become available, thousands of patients are turning to increasingly popular services that link them to potential donors, places such as www.livingdonorsonline.org, where people post their stories and needs in hopes of finding a life-saving organ.

In Tejeda's case, a group of friends have offered to sign him up for www.matchingdonors.com, a Web site that lists the names and histories of the patients for a fee and makes them available for potential donors. The fees are $300 a month or $600 for a lifetime membership.

"We want to see how people can begin to participate in different ways," said Nick Sandoval, a friend of Tejeda's. Sandoval, a community organizer, met Tejeda through his work and has offered to pay for Tejeda to enlist in Matching Donors.

Almost 70,000 people nationwide are waiting for kidneys, up from 30,000 who were on the list in the early 1990s, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. The dramatic increase is one reason why waiting times are now usually longer than three years, and in some areas longer than six.

Some experts say the increase in wait time is fueled in part by an increased interest in living donations. Of 22,016 transplant donations performed in the first nine months of 2006, 5,139 came from living donors.

But the ethics of seeking and receiving an organ from a healthy person are hotly debated in the medical community.

Stanford bioethicist David Magnus told MediaNews this system is creating an inappropriate "free market" for living donors. Patients with means to find a matching donor could circumvent a long-standing, if imperfect, organ allocation system designed to ensure that the sickest patients get priority, Magnus said.

"The root problem, a lack of organs, just gets worse and worse, the wait time longer and the waiting lists get larger and larger, so what happens under those circumstances is that people get desperate," he said. "Every time we put an organ in a patient, there's some other patient who's not getting it."

Discussions like this may work well in the abstract, said Sandoval. But when you're looking at a father of three children, an active member of the community whose life is at stake, it's difficult to be philosophic, he said.

"I can sit down and talk about ethics or look at the human experience," he said. "But the man has been waiting for four years. Am I going to leave it up to chance, or am I going to help this guy?"
MediaNews contributed to this report. Claudia Melendez Salinas can be reached at 753-6755 or cmelendez@montereyherald.com.

URL: http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/16408799.htm?source=rss&channel=montereyherald_news

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