Search For Organ Takes Different Route

By Tara Grassia

Staff Writer

March 7, 2004

SALEM -- Jessica Calderbank is relying on the kindness of strangers to regain her health.

The Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital patient has suffered from diabetes since she was 10 years old. Now, 22 years later diabetes has affected her kidney, leaving Jessica to struggle with end-stage kidney failure and in need of a transplant.

Roughly 60,000 people in the United States remain on a waiting list to receive a transplant and only 5,000 kidneys become available every year.

Jessica, formerly Jessica Fogg of Salem City, has type-O blood making restrictions to receive a donor organ even more tight than the usual regulations and low donation rates.

Since June of 2003, the Calderbank's have had no luck with finding a transplant and remained on the transplant waiting list along with others in need of a new organ. She went on dialysis in September and not only suffers from the aftermath of dialysis from the treatment, but also is anemic as well.

"I want a kidney to move ahead with my health, I'm tired of being sick and I want to move on with my life, have more children and just do things that right now I can't do," she said. "My health keeps going downhill."

Her husband Glenn decided he was not giving up hope and is attempting every endeavor to help his wife find a much-needed kidney.

After a long-sickened weekend, he told Jessica he placed an advertisement in a newspaper to trade his A-type kidney for an O-type kidney for his wife.

"I asked him why he would do such a thing. He said he did it because he loves me and wants me to get better," she said.

Since then Jessica said several television news stations have aired her story and one report was picked up by a few affiliate stations which spread the couple's story nationwide. After broadcasting across the nation, the family received over 50 phone calls varying from Texas to California to Alabama and elsewhere in the U.S.

"I think it's great, I didn't think there was that many people out there that cared about strangers," Calderbank said.

But a road block rose again when she found out that Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, located in Camden, has a strict policy about accepting outside, non-related donors. Transplant Coordinator Shirley Lay-Martino said the hospital generally only accepts donations from relatives or those who are emotionally tied and connected to the patient.

"It is not to say we never will, but we need to make sure the whole community is on the same page in feeling that we are not doing anyone any harm," she said. "With an outside donor, you don't get anything out of it other than knowing you are helping someone else and their benefit is quite a bit less than an family member's."

Lay-Martino added that many times when people think of organ donations they assume the process should be easy, but there is a lot involved that people don't realize when donating an organ.

"It's not like giving an anonymous unit of blood" she said "when it comes to a solid organ we're talking about undergoing major surgery and loss of an organ."

Jessica now awaits the results of the hospital's board of ethics meeting, which consists of clergy, nurses and physicians that will discuss the notion of taking an outside kidney donor.

Down and out, hope shone through again when she received a call from a "long-lost" uncle in Pennsville, Walter Mowers, who said he has O-type blood as well and will go through the procedures of being tested for blood type verification and complete the necessary health screenings to see if he is a viable donor.

Jessica said she received a call from a woman who said her 19-year old son needs a kidney bad and his blood type is A. If the kidney donation goes through with Mowers or the hospital approves to take an outside donor, Glenn promised to donate his own kidney to the young boy in need, who desperately awaits a kidney just like Jessica.

Copyright © 2004 Today's Sunbeam.

This article posted March 21, 2004.