Health Care
Toledo program allows patients to leave dialysis, bottlenecked transplant list behindWritten by John Krudy | | jkrudy@toledofreepress.com
Angela Heckman sits in front of the bar at John’s Korner Bar and Grill near Byrne and Heatherdowns in Toledo, while Laurie Sarvo, her mother, polishes glasses behind it. It’s dark inside, long before the night’s festivities, and it’s hard to see the one beer-drinker the far end. But Sarvo can still see the difference in her daughter.
“It’s great, I can do whatever I want,” Heckman says. She received a new kidney in July 2007, and and two months later, her mother donated a kidney to a stranger.
Sarvo scoffs at her daughter’s humility.
“She looks FANTASTIC.”
“I guess I do look better,” Heckman says.
“A lot better,” Sarvo insists.
It would have been hard for her to do any worse. In 1996, then 21-year-old Heckman contracted the autoimmune disease glomerulonephritis, an inflammation of the kidney. And like 75,000 people in the United States, Heckman began dialysis to clean her blood. Three times a week, three hours each time.
“It wasn’t so bad at first, but it wore my body down,” Heckman says. “And I had to worry about it every time I would travel somewhere, and set up treatments there.”
“She was lucky she was so young, or it would have taken a lot more out of her,” Sarvo says.
Heckman underwent a type of treatment called hemodialysis, in which her blood was circulated across filters and solutions to remove toxins. In a normal kidney, those toxins would be removed into the urine, continuously, without any conscious care. But Heckman faced the worry and stress of tri-weekly weigh-ins, blood pressure checks, health assessments and tedious waits. Heckman was pale and weak.
Sarvo remembers seeing George, a recipient who received a kidney after Heckman, before he received his transplant.
“I looked at him, and he looked like death,” she says. Heckman, only 30 in 2006, was looking more and more like that. And that’s when Rees arrived.
“He’s our savior: that’s how I look at it,” Sarvo says. She and Heckman expected to do a normal donation, in which she would give one of her two kidneys to her daughter. But they weren’t compatible, and Heckman faced a wait of one and a half to five years before she could get a transplant. But Rees and others at the Alliance for Paired Donation (APD) had pioneered a new method, in which Heckman would receive a stranger’s kidney, and Sarvo would pass on one of her own.
Altruism in action
On July 26, 2007, Matt Jones of Traverse City, Mich., donated his kidney to Barb Bunnell of Phoenix. But instead of limiting his Jones’ generosity to one saved stranger, the APD required and orchestrated a donation from Bunnell’s husband Ron. A few weeks later, he gave a kidney to Heckman, and two months after that, Sarvo indirectly paid for her daughter’s new organ, by giving a kidney to a recipient in Columbus. That woman’s daughter donated to George, whose sister gave a kidney to a man in Maryland, whose wife … there’s no end in sight. The most recent donation was in March 2008, to a woman in Ohio.
Sarvo says her donation surgery was small challenge, but certainly worth it.
“I had to travel, and pay my own expenses,” she says. “I was hoping to donate in Florida, or someplace cool, but …” She throws up her hands in mock disappointment.
“It hasn’t affected my health at all. The first four people in the chain and me, we’re like family,” Sarvo says, glancing at her daughter. Heckman emails often with Ron Bunnell. Sarvo visited George in the hospital after their transplant.
He didn’t look like death anymore.
“Three days after that, I went back,” she says. “He was not even close to being the person he was. Even hours after transplanting, and he just looks like health.”
That new health, alien to a woman who’s been on dialysis machines for 10 years, is opening doors for Heckman. She won a bronze medal in racquetball for Team Ohio in this year’s U.S. Transplant Games. She started at Owens Community College Aug. 18, to study ultrasound imaging as part of the “Opt for a New Start” program for kidney recipients.
And Sarvo said giving a kidney has improved her own life.
“We get along a lot better,” she said “We’re a lot closer.” Both are passionate about the paired donation cause, and June 22, Sarvo, Heckman and the John’s Korner regulars raised $4187 to donate to the APD. Sarvo pulls a bulging, purple Crown Royale bag from her purse, and shakes the change inside.
“We couldn’t have done it without our patrons,” she says. But while those monetary donations our essential, they can’t equal the donation Sarvo and others are giving to strangers, so they can save a family member or friend.
“If I had more parts to give,” she says, “I’d give ‘em all.”
APD needs funding
The Alliance for Paired Donation (APD) is growing rapidly. The UT-based group now has 64 transplant centers in 24 states, and last year made 19 kidney transplants.
“I think we can do 3,000 a year, if we come together and make this work” said Dr. Michael Rees, chair of the group’s Scientific Advisory Committee. “If you really want to make this work, you need a system-wide solution, for poor and elite.”
The advantages are clear: a good living match is hard to find, and a dead person’s kidney, transplanted, works for an average of 8.6 years. A live one, which the APD’s transplants allow to be moved into its new body nearly immediately, gives around 16.6 years.
And the problems are stark. Rees said 75,000 people are currently waiting for a kidney transplant. Only around 17,000 of those get a transplant each year. 4,000 die, and 4,000 are too sick to justify doing the surgery.
“That means 25,000 off the list, but 30,000 on to the list each year,” Rees said.
While Rees has received institutional and financial help from UT, and grants from other groups and individuals, he still needs $650,000 to run the program next year. For more information, or to donate, visit
www.paireddonation.org— John Krudy
http://www.toledofreepress.com/2008/10/03/toledo-program-allows-patients-to-leave-dialysis-bottlenecked-transplant-list-behind/
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