From Military Times, By: Rachael Kalinyak
Last October, Kai Johns, an Army veteran and engineer for Sprint, was told by doctors that both of his kidneys had failed and he needed an immediate transplant. After seeing a post on Facebook, an old friend of his from the Army, Robert Harmon, offered to help, reports Fox 5 DC.
Robert Harmon sits in Medstar Georgetown University Hospital before the surgery.
“It was a Facebook post. It said, a kidney for Kai,” Harmon told Fox 5 DC. “I Facebook messaged [his wife], and ask her, what could I do to start getting tested.”
Johns and Harmon have known each other for 22 years. The two served in the Army as paratroopers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but had not seen each other in over 15 years.
Kai Johns awaits the kidney transplant surgery from Robert Harmon that will save his life.
“We were paratroopers in the Army together and that brotherhood runs deep,” Harmon said. Harmon, 42, is a telecommunication operations chief at the 3rd Infantry Division Sustainment Brigade at Fort Stewart, Georgia.
Kai Johns hugs his wife before surgery at Medstar Georgetown University Hospital.
Johns was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease, which affects around 600,000 people in the United States alone. After getting tested at the MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute in Washington, DC, he learned that he would get the kidney he needed. And on April 27, Harmon donated a kidney to Johns. The three-hour surgery was performed by Dr. Jennifer Verbesey at Medstar Georgetown University Hospital.
Surgery for the kidney transplant is underway.
“For someone to step up and just save your life — you can’t come up with a word for it,” Johns told Fox 5 DC.
To cover the costs of the procedure, the family has been holding several fundraisers and started a website for donations. Currently they have raised $30,870 of their $75,000 goal. To help the Johns’ family, click here.
“It was a Facebook post. It said, a kidney for Kai,” Harmon told Fox 5 DC. “I Facebook messaged [his wife], and ask her, what could I do to start getting tested.”
Johns and Harmon have known each other for 22 years. The two served in the Army as paratroopers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but had not seen each other in over 15 years.
“We were paratroopers in the Army together and that brotherhood runs deep,” Harmon said. Harmon, 42, is a telecommunication operations chief at the 3rd Infantry Division Sustainment Brigade at Fort Stewart, Georgia.
Johns was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease, which affects around 600,000 people in the United States alone. After getting tested at the MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute in Washington, DC, he learned that he would get the kidney he needed. And on April 27, Harmon donated a kidney to Johns. The three-hour surgery was performed by Dr. Jennifer Verbesey at Medstar Georgetown University Hospital.
“For someone to step up and just save your life — you can’t come up with a word for it,” Johns told Fox 5 DC.
To cover the costs of the procedure, the family has been holding several fundraisers and started a website for donations. Currently they have raised $30,870 of their $75,000 goal. To help the Johns’ family, click here.
Kidney Dialysis
From Washington Post, By Amy B Wang
During the three years that HBO's “Last Week Tonight” has aired, host John Oliver has skewered one political absurdity after another.
But the late-night comedian has also used his platform to delve into more complicated issues — the debate over net neutrality, for example — often with comical and significant results.
On Sunday, Oliver once again turned his attention to a topic that he admitted would risk prompting viewers to “push the button on your TV remote marked 'Dear God Literally Anything Else.'”
Kidney dialysis.
Oliver explained dialysis as a process in which a person is hooked up to a machine that removes blood out of the body, cleans it, then returns it to circulation. “Think of it as a Brita pitcher for your blood,” he said.
And he urged people to learn about the for-profit dialysis industry, however boring it may seem, because an increasing number of people in the United States suffer from kidney disease and rely on the “exhausting process” of dialysis to stay alive.
Kidney disease is the ninth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Oliver also cited a 2010 ProPublica investigation that revealed the United States “continues to have one of the industrialized world's highest mortality rates for dialysis care” despite spending more on it than other nations, by some accounts.
“So we're spending the most to essentially get the least,” Oliver said. “We're basically paying for a fully loaded Lamborghini and receiving a drunk donkey on roller skates.”
Oliver recounted the history of how the country's for-profit dialysis industry came to be — the result, he said, of good intentions mixed with “bad incentives, poor oversight and profiteering.”
[People with autism, intellectual disabilities fight bias in transplants]
In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed a bill into law saying the government would pay for dialysis for anyone who needed it.
“Essentially we have universal health care in this country, for one organ in your body,” Oliver said. “It's like your kidneys, and only your kidneys, are Canadian.”
At the time, only about 10,000 patients needed coverage, but over the past four decades, the rise of diabetes and high blood pressure has led to nearly half a million people requiring dialysis, Oliver said. The cost of covering dialysis now accounts for 1 percent of the federal budget, he added.
As a result, a network of outpatient dialysis clinics sprung up around the country to accommodate these patients' needs. Two large companies own 70 percent of these clinics, Oliver noted: Fresenius Medical Care and DaVita.
Despite “significant issues with both of them,” Oliver said he would focus on DaVita, a $13 billion company based in Denver.
He aired clips showing DaVita chief executive Kent Thiry riding into company meetings on a horse, dressed as a musketeer, referring to himself as a “mayor” and quoting from “The Man in the Iron Mask.”
Because federal guidelines do not require doctors to be on site at for-profit dialysis clinics, DaVita patients often reported feeling rushed, with employees allegedly cutting corners for the sake of speed.
[What makes someone donate a kidney to a stranger?]
Megallan Handford, a former DaVita nurse who claims he was fired for trying to unionize its employees, told Oliver the company's focus “was all about numbers,” sometimes at the expense of patient safety.
“When I was working at DaVita, the priorities for transitioning patients was to get them on dialysis and get the next patient on as soon as possible,” Handford told Oliver. “You would have sometimes 15, maybe 25 minutes to get that next patient on the machine, so you were not properly disinfecting.”
Oliver ran through other complaints that have been made against DaVita, including questionable doctor referrals and accusations that the company purposely wasted drugs to be able to bill the federal government more.
“If it's beginning to feel like DaVita is being run like a volume business …” Oliver started, before cutting to a clip that showed Thiry comparing his management of DaVita to that of Taco Bell. (Before the show ended, Oliver would apologize — to Taco Bell.)
Toward the end of his segment, Oliver emphasized that problems with the for-profit dialysis industry were not limited to DaVita.
He also called for better government oversight, as well as improved incentives for kidney transplants and health care “to keep out of dialysis in the first place.”
Oliver also praised those who were willing to donate one of their two kidneys while still alive.
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