WASHINGTON: Brenda Hudson recalls weeks spent in a glass-enclosed isolation room after her first kidney transplant, her family allowed to visit only when suited up against germs.
That transplant lasted a remarkable four decades — and now Hudson’s recovery from a second one, this time faster and surrounded by germy visitors, showcases how far organ transplants have come and the hurdles that still await.
“I’m ready to be well again,” Hudson exclaimed before being wheeled into an operating room at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital last month, far more confident than back at age 17 when she was that hospital’s first recipient of a living-donor kidney.
Transplants still require courage, but medical advances haven’t just helped patients. Hudson’s initial donor, her older sister, has a scar stretching from belly to side where doctors cut into her rib cage. This time Hudson’s husband donated, and went home two days after surgeons squeezed his kidney through a roughly 3-inch incision.
Hudson’s own lupus-damaged kidneys were removed about a month before her first transplant. That’s hardly ever done anymore — nonworking kidneys shrink to make room.
Back then, finding a donor was pretty miraculous.
It still is.
And with more than 120,000 people on the national waiting list for a kidney or other donated organ — but only about 30,000 transplants performed each year — new moves are getting underway to try to ease the critical shortage.
Efforts range from smartphone apps letting would-be donors register with a few clicks, to helping transplant centers use some organs that today would be discarded for fear they’re not good enough.
“I really didn’t think about getting another kidney. How could I be that fortunate?” said Hudson, 57, of Owings, Maryland, who this time went home five days after surgery. Her thoughts strayed to friends on dialysis: “I just wish we could see more donors coming out.”
The average kidney from a deceased donor lasts 10 years, while one from a living donor averages about 15 years, said Dr. David Klassen of UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system. Doctors can’t explain why occasionally people like Hudson beat those odds by a lot.
Dana Hudson knew his wife wouldn’t ask for another kidney so when her first deteriorated badly enough to require dialysis, he volunteered.
Dr. Matthew Cooper, Georgetown’s kidney and pancreas transplant director, examined the fist-sized organ and proclaimed it “a beauty.”
Sewing it into its new owner, however, would prove nerve-wracking.
More than 6,000 people died last year waiting for a new kidney, liver, lung or other organ, according to UNOS.
Last month, the White House issued a call to reduce the wait, and highlighted $160 million in regenerative research that one day might offer alternative therapies.
Kidneys are most in demand, with nearly 100,000 people on the national transplant list awaiting one.
(Sourced from Agencies, Feature Image Courtesy: www.oneindia.com)
