Sister's kidney gives brother freedom from dialysis

Sister's kidney gives brother freedom from dialysis

BY DEAN OLSEN
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
Published Nov. 28, 2009 @ 1:21 p.m.

Aaron Rosa always had a close relationship with his sister, Ruth.

But after the gift she gave him on Nov. 11, their bond reached a new level.

"Every time I look at her, I start to cry," Rosa, a Decatur warehouse worker, said this week. "She's really doing a huge thing for me."

Rosa, 33, who is married and has a 9-month-old son, was freed from dialysis treatments when Ruth, 30, of Seattle, donated one of her kidneys to him in a transplant operation at Springfield's Memorial Medical Center.

The living-donor procedure was the first kidney transplant in more than 14 months at Memorial, which had deactivated its kidney and pancreas transplant program in fall 2008.

Springfield's program went on hiatus while a doctor was recruited to replace a retiring nephrologist who plays a key role in caring for transplant patients, but doesn't perform the surgery.

Memorial's program, which has completed more than 740 transplants since 1973 and typically performs 21 to 41 kidney transplants each year, officially reactivated in late August.

The new transplant nephrologist, Dr. Bradford West, 33, is treating Rosa for minor organ-rejection issues. West, a Springfield Clinic physician, also works with 125 other patients who are on a waiting list for kidney and pancreas transplants at Memorial.

Two more transplants - both involving donated kidneys from people who had died - have taken place at Memorial since Rosa's transplant, Memorial spokesman Michael Leathers said.

While Memorial's program was inactive, Rosa could have transferred to the transplant programs at Peoria's OSF Saint Francis Medical Center or Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. But his wife, Sarah, 29, was pregnant with their first child, and Rosa didn't want to put his family through the stress of even more travel.

"It's a lot more convenient here," Rosa said during a visit this week for a checkup.

Rosa was born with a congenital problem that resulted in both of his kidneys failing in his late 20s. He began kidney dialysis - a process that filters the waste out of his blood - in 2005.

He would spend more than four hours every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday undergoing the procedure at a dialysis center in Decatur. He still worked full time for Decatur's Pepsi distributorship by pulling 10-hour shifts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and putting in additional hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Medicare paid for his dialysis, but Rosa wanted a life without being tethered to a machine. His sister turned out to be a match as a potential donor, and she wanted to help her big brother.

Ruth Rosa, office manager at a nonprofit community center in Seattle, said she was disappointed when Memorial's program went on hiatus because she was emotionally geared up for the procedure. But when the program resumed, she remained committed.

She is single. She said her "significant other," a man who was worried about her safety, ultimately supported her choice.

After the procedure, performed by surgeon Dr. Edward Alfrey of Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Rosa faced more post-operative pain than her brother, which can be common in live-donor procedures because of the route used to remove the healthy kidney.

Earlier this week, two weeks after the transplant, Ruth was walking slowly and feeling a "tight soreness" on her left side, where the kidney was removed.

Still, she said the pain and inconvenience was worth it.

"It feels peaceful," she said about helping her brothers. "Now he's free to plan his life without being glued to a dialysis machine."

Aaron Rosa said the nurses who cared for him at Memorial were "just as sweet as anyone can be."

Rosa, who stands 5-foot-10 and normally weighs 238 pounds, has gained 60 pounds since the transplant because of medicine that caused him to retain water. He hopes to start losing the weight soon.

Despite the temporary inconvenience of not being able to fit into most of his clothes, he said he is optimistic about the future. He hopes to complete outpatient intravenous treatments in the next week or so to deal with the minor rejection issues and eventually return to work.

To reduce the risk of infection and illness when his immune system is being suppressed by medicine, he won't be spending the Thanksgiving holiday weekend with his mother and sister in Decatur. It will just be him, his wife and their son enjoying the time together.

Regardless, Rosa said the holiday has taken on a new meaning this year.

"This year's been such a blessing," he said. "I have plenty to be thankful for."

Dean Olsen can be reached at 788-1543.

Numbers to know about kidney transplants

* Medicare pays hospitals about $60,000 for most kidney transplants and related hospital stays. Medicare and private insurance companies connected with the transplant recipient pay an average of $26,000 for the medical costs associated with the donor.
* Transplants save money for Medicare in the long run because dialysis costs Medicare $53,000 to $72,000 a year per patient.
* Total Medicare spending for dialysis totals about $17 billion each year, an amount that is increasing because more people - because of obesity and other lifestyle factors - are developing diabetes and seeing their kidney function decline.
* Patients who receive kidney transplants generally live 15 years longer than patients on dialysis.
* Several thousand people in Illinois are waiting for kidney transplants. Several hundred die each year while on waiting lists.

Sources: Dr. Edward Alfrey, U.S. Renal Data System, Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and Memorial Medical Center.

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