Trade a kidney, save a life

Program lets families barter with others after match is found

By Tim Bonfield

Enquirer staff writer

April 23, 2005

Paul and Rose Meyer of Taylor Mill were part of a four-way kidney transplant in Toledo and Cincinnati. The Enquirer/Steven M. Herppich

Paul Meyer owes his health to what might be the ultimate form of barter.

Meyer, a 59-year-old resident of Taylor Mill, became the first person in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky to receive a kidney transplant through a new living organ donor matching program in Ohio.

"There's a high likelihood that this program will be the model for a national program," said Dr. E. Steve Woodle, chief of the transplantation division of the Health Alliance of Greater Cincinnati, which runs Christ Hospital.

Should this organ-trading program be adopted nationally, experts estimate that the waiting list for kidney transplants could be reduced by 5 percent to 10 percent. That means thousands of people with potentially deadly kidney failure can hope to live longer and avoid spending as much as three days a week getting dialysis treatment.

"This was an opportunity for me to dodge the dialysis monster," Meyer said.

Here's how the program worked for the Meyer family:

Paul's wife, Rose, and two daughters were willing to donate a kidney when Paul discovered about a year ago that his diabetes had become bad enough to reduce his kidney function to 12 percent of normal.

But Paul has type O blood, and they have type A.

The mismatch made a donation impossible. So in September, Paul went on the waiting list for a cadaver-donated organ. Months passed with no match found.

Meanwhile, in Toledo, 57-year-old Josephine Vollmer was enduring dialysis treatments. Her 34-year-old son, Daniel, wanted to donate a kidney. But he wasn't a match.

Then along came the paired donation program launched in November by the Ohio Solid Organ Transplantation Consortium. Its computer programs - designed at the University of Cincinnati - determined that Daniel's kidney would work for Paul Meyer, and Rose's would work for Josephine Vollmer.

So the families agreed to trade organ donors.

April 11, four teams of surgeons went to work. One team in Cincinnati removed Daniel's kidney. Another transplanted it into Paul Meyer. In Toledo, at the Medical College of Ohio, another team removed Rose's kidney while another transplanted it into Josephine Vollmer.

The operations were a success all around - and the entire thing was covered by CNN, which aired stories about the program Wednesday and Thursday.

The transplants were the third pair traded through Ohio's program - and the first to involve a local family. The program has another 40 pairs registered - including eight potential matches who are going through final testing.

Seven more local families are in the program, but none has found a match yet, Woodle said.

"This is a really neat program," Rose Meyer said.

Unlike traditional cadaver-donated organ transplants, this program is more open to the families involved meeting each other. The Meyers say they have become friends with the Vollmers. Relatives visited each other in the hospital, and the families plan to get together in the next few months to celebrate.

Rose said she thought it was worth risking major surgery hundreds of miles away from her husband, even though her kidney wasn't going to her husband.

"I was thrilled to be able to do it. I look at it as if I helped two people, not just one," Rose said.

For Rose, the two-hour surgery wasn't as extreme as donating a kidney used to be. Instead of making an incision that wraps halfway around the abdomen, kidneys now can be removed through laparoscopic surgery.

Such procedures use a four-inch incision and long, thin instruments poked through holes in the body while the surgeon views his or her actions via a tiny video camera placed inside. She was back on her feet within two days.

Her biggest life change will be giving up a medicine she takes for arthritis because it has an increased risk of harming her remaining kidney.

"I'll have to settle for Tylenol now," Rose said.

A similar matching program will be launched in New Jersey in the next few weeks. It also is being considered by transplant centers in Florida, California, Tennessee and several other states.

Nationwide, about 40 percent of all kidney transplants involve living donors, a figure that has risen quickly in the past decade. In Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, it exceeds 55 percent.

Dr. Michael Cardi, a kidney specialist at Christ Hospital, said the new matching program probably won't eliminate waiting lists, but every new effort helps.

"The waiting lists keep growing. So the shortage of organs is becoming more and more of a crisis," Cardi said.

In Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, 288 patients were waiting for organs, as of March 30, including 189 people seeking kidney transplants, according to the LifeCenter Organ Donor Network, which coordinates cadaver-organ donations in this area. Nationwide, more than 87,000 people are on the national waiting list.

E-mail tbonfield@enquirer.com

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This article posted May 26, 2005.