Mom, daughter to celebrate kidneys’ 82nd birthday

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Mom, daughter to celebrate kidneys’ 82nd birthday

By BEN HACKMAN
Staff Writer
Lebanon Daily News
March 9

North Cornwall Township resident Cheryl Green is 52 years old, but her kidney will turn 82 tomorrow.

That’s because Green underwent a kidney transplant after she suffered renal failure more than 30 years ago.

Then a 21-year-old music major at Penn State’s University Park campus, Green suffered a full cardiac arrest in the fall of 1975. She was rushed to a hospital, and doctors discovered her kidneys had failed.

Green did not receive a transplant right away. First, she received peritoneal dialysis.

“What it is, they use your own abdominal cavity to do dialysis,” she explained. “They put dialysis fluid into your abdominal cavity. Through osmosis, it sucks out all the poisons and things, and then it drains out.”

For two months, Green said, she underwent dialysis 12 hours a night four nights per week and attended college classes during the day.

“I had some wonderful roommates and friends in the dorms,” she said. “Everyone kind of took care of me. I never worried.

“As
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soon as I started dialysis, even before that, when my kidneys first failed, my family had all offered to donate to me,” she recalled. “So as soon as I started dialysis, they started testing. And she (Green’s mother, Lorraine) was the only one that was a suitable donor.”

Lorraine Green, then 51, spent a week undergoing blood and tissue tests to see if Cheryl’s body would accept her transplanted kidney.

“They’re going to make sure the donor can give,” said Lorraine, who lives in Jenkintown. “I think they give you every test imaginable to make sure you’re healthy enough to give a kidney.”

On April 20, 1977, Cheryl received her mother’s kidney during a five-hour operation at the University of Pennsylvania’s hospital in Philadelphia.

Cheryl said the doctors didn’t know the precise cause of her kidney failure but suspected the many strep-throat infections she had as a child were a factor. She said the transplant “definitely” saved her life.

“I could have stayed on dialysis, and many people live many, many years on dialysis,” she said. “But, in my opinion, it’s not as free. Other than taking immunosuppressive medication that I have to take every day ... I don’t have to take dialysis anymore.”

While Lorraine said her own life didn’t change much after the transplant, Cheryl said hers was transformed.

“If I had not had the transplant, I don’t think I would have been able to do any number of the things I am able to do now,” she said. “I would have been too sick.”

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in music, Cheryl attended Penn State’s College of Medicine in Hershey and earned her physician’s-assistant degree. She has worked as a physician’s assistant at the Lebanon VA Medical Center for nearly 20 years.

Cheryl said she has been able to better the lives of others because of the transplant.

“Do you realize how your mother donating a kidney saved an awful lot of people?” a friend asked her recently.

The Greens were among 160 donors and recipients that the Gift of Life Donor Program recognized at a recent dinner in King of Prussia. They received certificates from the federal Department of Health and Human Services acknowledging their kidney transplant.

Gift of Life is a nonprofit organ-procurement organization that last year tried to help allocate organs to the more than 5,400 people in eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware who are waiting for an organ transplant, according to John Green (no relation to Cheryl and Lorraine), director of community relations.

Cheryl, who is on the board of directors for the Kidney Foundation of Central Pennsylvania, said transplanted kidneys last an average of 18 to 20 years. The one she got from her mother has lasted 30.

“On March 11, our kidneys turn 82,” she said. “So we’re going to get together and celebrate our kidneys’ birthday.”

BenHackman@LDNews.com

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