Man donates kidney to a stranger

Man donates kidney to a stranger

By Dan Irwin
NEW CASTLE NEWS (NEW CASTLE, Pa.)

NEW CASTLE, Pa.— Few people would offer a ride to a stranger these days.
Fewer still might give one a kidney. That puts Rob Rice in some elite company. Last month, the 37-year-old West Pittsburg man donated one of his kidneys to a Beaver Falls woman he never met until two days after the transplant.
Such altruistic donations — transplants in which a living donor provides a kidney for a stranger — have happened fewer than 23 times a year in the United States since 1988, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Moreover, the network says, only about 5 percent of altruistic donor applicants are accepted, due to the rigorous physical and mental testing they must pass. Rice, though, has no complaints.
“It was a good experience,” he said. “There was nothing bad about it. I was never scared one bit. Really, I am more nervous about going to the dentist than I was going through this.”
So why would a man wake up one day and decide that he has one more kidney than he really needs? Colleen Ursida wondered that, too. And the 39-year-old recipient of Rice’s kidney admits to having hoped that it wasn’t all too good to be true.
On dialysis since August, Ursida couldn’t find a medically acceptable donor among her parents, seven brothers or one sister. Even a friend who had volunteered to donate turned out to be incompatible.
“So I’d been on the transplant list since January,” Ursida said. “They told me there was a two- to six-year waiting period. Then suddenly, they called me and said they had an altruistic donor who wanted to have the surgery done within two weeks.
“I had to get right to the lab and start having tests," she said. "I just couldn’t imagine why someone would want to give up a kidney that’s perfectly healthy. In fact, for me, that was the hardest part — just praying for those two weeks that whoever it was wouldn’t change his mind.”
Ursida and Rice finally met two days after their surgeries in Pittsburgh, and her question was answered.
“I’m an activities assistant at the Southwest Veterans Center (also in Pittsburgh),” Rice said. “Basically, I spoil them with activities. We’ve got things like a Scrabble group, we’ve got movies, we’ve got bingo — we have everything going on. We spoil them pretty good.
“But there’s like 10 of the veterans I know who are on dialysis," he said. "They go three days a week, and I see them come back, and they’re all tired and beat up, and I just said, ‘Hey, you know what? I could probably help someone out there.’ ”

PREPARATION
Rice’s first step toward becoming an altruistic donor came when he shared his idea with a VFW deputy who visited an evening bingo game that he was running. The deputy told him that she was waiting on a kidney herself, and was able to provide him with information and a phone number to call. Eventually, he was directed to the Pittsburgh office of CORE — the Center for Organ Recovery and Education — to fill out paperwork and have blood drawn. Not long after, Rice said, he was subjected to a battery of tests that included more blood work, a CAT scan, an EKG and an ultrasound to make sure that he had two kidneys in the first place. He also had to meet with a social worker and three different psychiatrists.
“They want to make sure it wasn’t somebody from Mars telling you to donate,” he laughed.
In addition to all the testing, Rice wound up with at least three other hurdles to leap. One was the reaction of family and friends. Although about 70 percent of them thought he was doing a wonderful thing, “about 30 percent asked, ‘Are you crazy?’ ”
His mother and father were among the latter group.
“They weren’t for it in the beginning,” Rice said. “But after they met the girl and her family, they loved it. They know it was for a good cause.”
Secondly, in his haste to get to CORE one snowy February morning, he got out of his car and neglected to put it in park. The vehicle ended up pinning him between itself and the garage door at his mother’s house.
“I was hurting pretty bad,” he said. “I should have gone to the hospital, but I didn’t. My hand was all bruised up, but luckily, my legs weren’t broken.”
And finally, after waiting three days for all his test results to be assembled, he was told his blood pressure was too high.
“I was like, you have got to be kidding me,” Rice said. “So I started dieting the next day. On May 22, the day of my evaluation, I weighed 220 pounds. On June 20, the day of my surgery, I weighed 200 pounds. I lost 20 pounds in less than a month. They told me I should write a diet book.”

SURGERY AND RECOVERY
When at last Rice was medically cleared for surgery, he was told to pick a date, and that the transplant team would select the recipient. His only hesitation stemmed from the fact that Veterans Week was June 10 through 17, and “I had to be at the center that week to spoil them.” Thus, he held off on having the operation until June 20.
That was a Wednesday, “and by Saturday, I was home walking my dog,” he said. “Everything really went well. I honestly feel like they didn’t take anything out. I don’t feel any different.”
Ursida, on the other hand, has noticed a marked change in her life.
“I feel awesome,” she said. “Everything is just like brand new. My kidney function is back to normal, and my doctors say I am accepting his kidney very well.”
According to Rice, Ursida’s level of creatinine — a waste product normally disposed of by the kidneys through urine — was 7.1 before the transplant surgery. A normal level for an adult woman is 0.5 to 1.1, and Ursida’s had dropped to 0.67 by the time Rice was discharged.
“They said it helped her immediately, big time. That’s something I’ll never forget.”
No longer strangers, Ursida and Rice — whose mothers unknowingly used to play bingo together in Beaver Falls — have bonded and pledged to stay in touch.
“My father already told him he’s part of the clan now,” Ursida said.
Rice, meanwhile, is getting used to the idea of living with one kidney. Prior to the surgery, his greatest fear about donating was getting involved in a car crash, since he drives 108 miles each day to work and back on heavily traveled highways. And, despite the fact that he did so much pre-donation research that “I feel I could probably do the surgery myself,” there was one kidney contingency that never occurred to him until after the fact.
“I heard a couple of my friends saying how their aunt had to get rid of one due to cancer,” he said. “I was like ‘uh-oh, I never thought of that.’ I was thinking maybe a car wreck. I never thought of that part.
“But who knows, if something does happen, maybe there’s someone else out there like me, and I’ll just end up getting one back.”

Dan Irwin writes for New Castle (Pa.) News.

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