Sister gives vital organ to local man in show of love

Sister gives vital organ to local man in show of love

Kidney transplant strengthens familial bonds

by HARRIET HAMILTON
summit daily news
Summit County, CO Colorado
June 3, 2008

His doctor’s phone call sent 31-year old Ryan Wondercheck reeling.

“You need a kidney transplant,” her voice said.

The Breckenridge resident couldn’t believe his ears. He was young. He felt great. He’d never had a sick day in his life.

“And you need it within the next six months,” she continued.

The enormity of the doctor’s words didn’t sink in immediately.

“Are you sure you have the right number?”

Unfortunately, she did.

Ryan left work early that evening. The devastating call had come during his shift at the Summit Daily News copy desk. When he walked out into the night air, his first thought was about how to break the news to his girlfriend, Laura Adams, and to his family back in Nebraska.

One of three siblings in a close family, he knew he could depend on his parents and two sisters for support. What he didn’t realize at the time was just how vital that support would be.

As fate would have it, his 25-year-old kid sister, Kristin, turned out one of the few people in the world who could give him what he needed more than anything — a healthy kidney.

Reaction to the news
No one knows why Ryan’s kidneys both gave out. He was feeling fine when he went for a routine physical at High Country Health Care last September. Neither he nor his doctor expected the lab results to show kidney failure.

“I was kind of bummed out,” he remembers. He got the voice mail telling him he would need to see a kidney specialist during a friend’s wedding celebration in Georgetown

Less than a week later, additional tests confirmed the verdict, and that’s when he got the call at work and realized he had to tell his family.

“We were shocked, because Ryan has never had any medical problems,” said his mother, Sharlene. “From good health to both his kidneys being so ruined they couldn’t be saved.”

In addition to manufacturing urine, adequate kidney function is necessary for the body to process certain waste products. When the organs fail — from causes as varied as diabetes, infection, blood pressure problems and autoimmune reactions — the body can’t survive.

Toxic wastes build up in the tissue, sometimes causing yellow crystals to form on the skin and around other vital organs such as the heart. Without any kidney function, deadly levels of untreated toxins will inevitably occur in the blood.

Once the kidneys fail completely, the only two options remaining are kidney transplant or dialysis — an unpleasant three- to eight-hour procedure usually required three to five times a week.

For Ryan, the significance of kidney failure didn’t sink in right away. He didn’t really know much about the organs. He didn’t understand that people whose kidneys don’t work end up needing dialysis to survive. At the time, he had no idea the national waiting list for a donated kidney is nearly 100,000 names long.

“I wouldn’t say I was in denial,” he said recently. “But I had no symptoms at all. I kept asking: ‘Are you sure I need this?’”

With Laura’s help, Ryan’s first priority involved finding out as much information as he could about kidneys in general, and his own body in particular.

To prolong what little function his kidneys had left, Ryan made some drastic lifestyle changes.

“I decreased my meat consumption immediately,” he said, because too much protein can be dangerous to the kidneys. To maximize his overall health, he also quit smoking and drinking “almost cold turkey.”

In some ways, Ryan was lucky. The routine blood test had revealed his kidney disease before the organs had failed absolutely. With less than 10 percent of his kidney function remaining, the search for a donor became a race against time. The sooner he could get a new kidney, the more likely he could avoid dialysis.

Search for a donor
Back in Nebraska, his family was going through their own medical ordeal. As soon as Ryan told them about his condition, they all got tested to see if their blood types matched his.

“We didn’t know if anyone could be a donor,” his mother said.

She, Ryan’s dad, Ron, and his older sister, Terra, turned out to have different blood types. Only he and Kristin shared a common type.

Finding a familial donor became even more critical for Ryan when further tests showed his blood had a high level of anti-human antibodies, which can increase the likelihood of rejection of a non-related donor kidney.

“Kidneys are so valuable,” Laura said, referring to the critical shortage of organs available for transplant. “The higher your (antibody level) is, the lower down you go on the waiting list.”

According to the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, the median waiting period for a transplanted kidney jumps from around 3 years to nearly 5 years for those with antibodies like Ryan’s.

Once the general blood-type match was confirmed, Kristin went through her own series of tests.

“Every test was like a hurdle,” she said recently.

Even though no one in the family put any pressure on her to donate, she never had any doubt about her willingness.

“The whole time, I wanted it to be me,” she said, her eyes tearing up. “I’d have done it for any of them. He would’ve done it for me.”

As much as they wanted the match, Ryan and his mom also wanted to be sure Kristin was making her own decision. Both repeatedly told her she didn’t have to do it.

“She never expressed any doubt to me,” Sharlene said. In fact, the donor coordinator informed her that Kristin was the “most proactive donor” she’d ever worked with.

The gift is given
By April, Kristin had passed all the preliminary tests with flying colors, and she and Ryan scheduled the transplant for a Monday morning in early May at Denver’s Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center.

The siblings joked through their final pre-op testing on the Wednesday before the surgery.

“Kristin was in such an enthusiastic and happy mood that day,” Sharlene remembered. “She was making jokes — keeping him in a really lighthearted mood.”

For Sharlene, the prospect of two of her three children in surgery simultaneously wasn’t easy to face.

“I really had a lot of mixed emotion,” she said. “On the one hand, I knew Ryan needed it to live, and I was eternally grateful. But I was also scared for Kristin.”

The morning of the surgery, Ryan drove his family and Laura to the hospital from the temporary apartment they’d rented in Cherry Creek. Afterward, Kristin admitted she’d been worried she wouldn’t get enough anesthesia during the surgery, but Sharlene remembers how strong her children seemed to her.

“Both kids appeared very calm,” she said.

Initially on side-by-side stretchers, Kristin went into surgery first. Within five hours, both were in recovery, and the doctors reported the transplant had gone like clockwork.

For Kristin, recovery was quick and she was back at her job in Omaha within two weeks. For her brother, the process will take longer. Even as his incision heals, his medical providers will continue to monitor him closely for kidney function and any signs of rejection.

Early results suggest Kristin’s gift was a successful one. The new kidney started working immediately inside Ryan’s body. His blood tests soon returned to normal, and he was discharged from the hospital within four days.

If everything continues to look good, he plans to be back at work by mid-June. In general, healthy kidney transplant recipients do quite well after surgery. Two former NBA stars — Sean Elliot and Alonzo Mourning — even were able to return to professional basketball after transplants.

When asked if the experience changed their relationship with each other, both siblings acknowledged a strengthening of what was already a close connection.
“It’s like the same,” Ryan said. “But I have one of her kidneys in me. I think it just reinforced the bond.”

Harriet Hamilton can be reached at (970) 668-4651, or at hhamilton@summitdaily.com.

Estimated first year kidney transplant costs in the U.S., 2007
• Procurement of donor kidney $58,300
• Hospital 74,500
• M.D. fees 21,500
• Evaluation 14,600
• Follow up (per year) 48,000
• Medications (per year) 29,500
• Total: 246,400
source: www.millman.com

Although he has health insurance, Ryan’s out of pocket expenses are considerable.
Checks or cash donations can be made to the “Ryan Wondercheck Medical Account” at First Bank in Breckenridge. Checks can also be mailed to: First Bank, Ryan Wondercheck Medical Account, 200 Ski Hill Rd., P.O. Box 7129, Breckenridge, Colo., 80424.

http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20080603/NEWS/604810689/0/FRONTPAGE