From Daily Mail, United Kingdom, By ANTHONY JOSEPH
Mother who has already given her four-year-old son part of her liver will now give him a kidney to save his life
A mother-of-three, who has already given her four-year-old son part of her liver, will now give him a kidney to save his life.
Sarah and Joe Lamont, from Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, are recovering after their ops at separate hospitals in Birmingham.
Her son Joe has been on dialysis since he was born with autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease, which - destroyed his kidney function at birth. He also has advanced liver disease.
Sarah, who has two other children, Max, 12, and Eve, 10, was allowed to visit little Joe, who is still heavily sedated and in intensive care last night.
In a video post via WhatsApp she said he was doing 'brilliant'.
She said: 'He is doing brilliant, he is very relaxed and his wee belly looks good.'
Last night both were recovering in separate hospitals in Birmingham, family and friends at their bedsides.
This sadly is only the first part of Joe's journey to a happy and content childhood free from dialysis, free from hospital visits and life-threatening complications.
Sarah hopes to donate a kidney in a few months' time, depending on how she and her 'precious wee man' recovers from this gruelling surgical procedure.
The next few days will be crucial as Sarah waits to hear wheher Joe's body has accepted her liver.
'That will be the worrying thing, until I hear the words from the doctors that his body has accepted the transplant I will be sick with worry,' Sarah said before going under the knife.
'That and being apart from Joe in another hospital, in case anything does go wrong, are my biggest fears.'
Sarah's mother and friends splitting their time between the two patients, confident that this is the beginning of a new life for Joe and his family. [Read more]
Scott and Cindy Chafian, of Suffolk, celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary in a most unusual way. They were both in Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, recovering from Scott’s donation of a kidney to Cindy, which took place last Tuesday, the day before their anniversary.
Cindy suffers from polycystic kidney disease, a hereditary condition that also ruined her mother’s kidneys and her grandfather’s. She has been on dialysis for two years, exhausted most of the time and frustrated at the limits it placed on her quality of life.
“If I got dinner on the table for my family, that was a good day,” Cindy said, “but that was the only thing that was going to happen.”
Scott could see how waiting for a kidney donor was affecting Cindy and decided to be tested for compatibility as a living donor. To their surprise, he was a match.
“We literally get to open a new chapter in our life together, fresh and cleanly on our 20th anniversary,” Scott said, “and there’s something symbolic in that.”
Scott learned a lot about living kidney donation during his journey.
“Technology is opening windows of compatibility that weren’t available when we were younger,” he said. “I would tell anyone who is thinking about living donation to get tested. You might be a match for someone.”
Beyond immediate friends and loved ones, Scott learned living donors can join donation “rings” in which a donor gives a kidney to the first compatible recipient, anywhere, which allows the donor’s intended recipient to receive the first kidney available from someone else.
“God bless the families who offer the kidneys of deceased donors,” said Dr. John Colonna, of Sentara Transplant Specialists. “But living donors help patients get off the waiting list, and off dialysis, a lot sooner.”
Colonna added that living donor kidneys last twice as long, on average, than those of deceased donors once they’re implanted.
There are 106,000 patients waiting for donated kidneys across the United States, and there are 22,000 kidney transplants performed each year. The program at Sentara Norfolk General hospital performs about 60 kidney transplants per year and has done 11 so far this month alone. The program also performs pancreas transplants and has done one of those since the beginning of 2017.
Cindy Chafian is looking forward to a new life off kidney dialysis.
“My husband will get his wife back, and my children will get their mother back,” she said. “It’s huge.”
Karin Davis knew something was wrong the minute she read her husband’s blood pressure.
Stevan Davis isn’t exactly a stranger to doctor’s offices — he has broken several bones, had surgery on his wrist and has a steel rod in one of his legs. He spent a lot of his life on the back of rough stock or behind the wheel of a demolition derby vehicle, putting his body through the wringer. But trips to the hospital were always visits of necessity, not wellness checks.
The only reason he even let his wife strap the blood pressure cuff on his arm was because she’d been doing readings on his parents while they were visiting. She wanted to look at his numbers, and he figured why not.
“It must have been like 240 over 120,” Karin Davis said. “It was really, really, alarmingly high.”
A “normal” blood pressure reads less than 120 over less than 80, according to the American Heart Association. Something as high as what Karin Davis measured for her husband constitutes a “hypertensive crisis.”
The two returned from his parents’ home in Saint Anthony, Idaho, the next day, and she brought him into St. John’s Medical Center, where she works as a registered nurse in the Intensive Care Unit. After a series of tests — an ultrasound, blood tests, more blood pressure readings — Stevan Davis was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease.
If it weren’t for that one reading, he wouldn’t have known. The pain associated with the disease — back pain, lethargy, vomiting — didn’t come until about seven years later. This fall he was told each of his kidneys had enlarged to about the size of a football and were riddled with cysts.
His siblings were tested as potential donors, but neither proved to be a good match. The third in line was family friend Monica McNamee, who met the Davises when she joined the staff at St. John’s as a traveling nurse in 2007. She now works in the ICU with Karin Davis.
“I always thought of organ donation as a beautiful and amazing gift,” she said, “and I knew one day I wanted to donate my organs when I passed away. But I really didn’t give it much more thought than that until Stevan’s story came into play.”
She underwent four months of testing, starting with lab tests and a thorough examination of her health and family history. She was tissue typed and sent to Intermountain Medical Center outside of Salt Lake City, where she underwent two days of X-rays, CT scans and interviews. One part of her testing required she collect her urine — all of it — for 24 hours. McNamee and Karin Davis named her pee bucket the “party pail.”
“I had a dinner party that evening, so I brought it with,” McNamee said with a laugh.
Dinner, she said, was with a bunch of other nurses. Nobody minded. In November she was told she was a match.
“I was relieved and amazed and thrilled,” McNamee said. “I wanted it to work out so bad.”
With a donor lined up, Stevan Davis was ready for the first of two surgeries: a bilateral nephrectomy. When surgeons removed his kidneys in mid-January, one weighed five pounds and the other came in half a pound heavier.
It was like having a baby, his wife joked. [Read more]
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