Patricia is my oldest daughter. She is a 37 year old stay at home mother of 2 young girls. Patricia has a sister and 2 brothers. She has suffered from kidney disease because of her System Lupus since she was 10 years old. It has been kicking her ass since then in one way or another. She is my hero and I fear I will lose her in the next few years.
Her kidneys finally shut down. She has been on dialysis since January 2014. She is in dire need of a kidney. There are unique antibodies in her blood that have made finding a match difficult. Her best chance is to find a living donor.
Patricia can receive a kidney from someone with blood type A or O.
You will be asked for your name, date of birth, address, telephone number and social security number. You will also be asked for the full name and date of birth of the person you are donating for. You will be required to complete telephone survey and a medical screening questionnaire.
If you're not a match but would like to donate, you can donate a kidney and even though it can't be used by the person you would like to have it, it goes into the pool and the person in question moves to the top of the list.
I hope your daughter finds a matched donor, I can only imagine how hard it must be to face this situation as a father. Finding a non-related living donor for a solid organ such as a kidney must be very hard. I was fortunate to receive a living adult stem cell donation a few years ago to (hopefully) cure an otherwise deadly form of leukemia, via Emory and Be The Match. I would likely not be around now without that donation. Although the donation required only time from the donor (to receive injections to concentrate bone marrow stem cells in his blood and then on the day before the transplant to spend hours hooked up to a machine that harvested the stem cells), it was an amazing sacrifice for him to make to a complete stranger.
Although my various medical conditions and age disqualify me from any donation - living or dead - I've always been listed as a donor on my drivers license, and I encourage everyone to do the same if there are no religious reasons not to. Otherwise your guts just end up in a bag of embalming fluid, or burned to ash with the rest of you, or otherwise disposed of as waste. The lack of enough deceased donors is why solid organ transplant recipients face such a difficult situation.
I’m ineligible for organ donation (medical conditions) but I have, in my work, referred three cases to LifeLink. In one of those cases the family was fairly adamant against donation until they found out the amount of good the tissues and organs could do. He donated his heart, both lungs, both sclera, both kidneys, his liver; his pancreas (experimentally), and gods only know how many other lives he affected through blood, stem cell, and tendon donation.
Thanks for all the kind words and wishes. I finally had a few hours last weekend to throw a website together. It is a work in progress. Please share it wherever you like as often as you can.
Looks like my daughter Patricia might get a kidney for her birthday!
Patricia got the call from Emory University Hospital last night (Saturday). We drove to Atlanta right away. Got there about midnight. They worked on all the pre-op stuff untill 3:30 this morning.
When the kidney gets here (don't know where it's coming from) they will do a quality check on it. If the kidney looks viable they will do the transplant tomorrow (Monday) morning as long as all of Patricia's pre-op stuff looks good. If the kidney does not look viable they will call everything off and we will wait for the next one.
The facility and staff have been great. The valets even know how to drive a Prius!
That's great news!! We will continue to pray for her during this time. Especially that the kidney is a good match and is viable for her. I'm also praying for there family of the donor.
I'm too old for organ donations. I am a registered Blue Card donor with Georgia Medical College where the entire corpse will be donated to train future doctors and surgeons.
Sunday afternoon update from Emory University Hospital.
Another surgical team doctor came in at 3:30 this afternoon and told Patricia that all the teams of specialist have cleared her for the surgery. That was great news.
He said that the kidney was coming from quite a distance away, and that they would start removing both kidneys from that person at about 4:30. This is how he expects things to play out because they expect to get quality organs from this particular donor.
1- A surgical team will harvest organs and send the most viable kidney here.
2- Team here will do a quality check and decide go or no go.
3- They will have already mapped out Patricia's plumbing via MRI so they know where everything is before they start cutting.
4- They will remove the kidney that has the strongest blood flow to it, probably the right one, and put the new one in. Surgery will take about an hour and a half.
Bonus info- The new to her kidney may not start working right away. This happens about 30% of the time. Turns put that the longer a kidney is out of the body the longer it will take to start working. They just continue dialysis until it "wakes up". Perfectly normal.
Surgery should be first thing in morning. Keep the prayers coming!
Patricia's fine. Was sitting up when I walked into recovery. Had some trouble breathing so they left the tube in longer. She will be headed back to her room shortly. Her new kidney is producing lots of urine already.
Good to hear. I have a SiL with a transplanted kidney. Actually her second replacement. First one held up for over 20 years, which is quite long for a transplant.
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