Kidney donor found in time for Athens man

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Kidney donor found in time for Athens man

By Sonny Turner
sonny@athensnews-courier.com
April 25, 2007

Ryan Collins has received the news he has been waiting for — news that could save his life.

The 30-year-old Athens emergency medical technician, who has been waiting for a kidney donor for months, has found a match. It’s from a Limestone County woman who is a friend of the family.

“He goes in the hospital May 1 and is set to have the transplant May 2,” said his father, Rick Collins. “Doctors tell us he could be in the hospital three to four weeks. But the fact that a donor has been found is great news for us.”

Doctors told Ryan last year he must have a new kidney in order to survive because the one he received from his dad 23 years ago is diseased and dying.

“Doctors have told me it could shut down any time now,” Ryan said last fall from his Sanderfer Road home in Athens. “They say it is functioning now like a quarter of a dollar (25 percent). It’s about gone.”

Ryan, who works for Decatur Ambulance Service, needed a kidney like the one he got from his father in 1984. That would not have been a problem if one of his sisters, Jaime, 24, or Amber, 18, could have given him one of their kidneys. But his sisters were ruled out as desirable matches because of his earlier transplant from his father. So, Ryan played the waiting game.

“We just recently got word that he has a donor,” said his mother, Bonnie Collins. “We just want to say God bless to everyone who helped make this a success.”

The surgery will be performed at the University of Alabama Birmingham Medical Center.

“I would have given him mine if I could,” said his father, 49, a corrections officer at the Limestone Correctional Facility. “But because of the DNA factor, that can’t happen, he needs a donor outside of our immediate family.”

Ryan was born with the disease known as “prune belly syndrome,” which is a congenital absence or weakness of the abdominal muscle.

A child with this disease typically is male with a thin or lax abdominal wall and a long and dilated prostatic urethra from prostatic hyperplasia. The condition can lead to kidney disease, as Ryan’s did.

“When he was born, he had no abdominal muscles,” Rick said. “Doctors told us at the time it was one in a million that this could happen. When he was born, they told us he would die or be a vegetable all his life and would never walk. But he beat the odds. When he received my kidney, they told us then that it would last only five years. But right now he is the longest-living kidney transplant patient that UAB has.”

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