Living organ donor ‘wasn’t going into it blind’; here’s how living with one kidney is going 10 years later

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — As public television and radio station WITF’s digital services manager, Ashlee Edwards crunches a lot of data. Big numbers.

But you don’t have to be too good at numbers to recognize one key difference between Ashlee and most other people: Most of us have two kidneys; Edwards has one.

That’s because Edwards donated one kidney to their cousin, TJ, who was born with renal failure. That was when TJ was 12, and Edwards — then in their 30s — was working at abc27’s sister station WJBF-NewsChannel 6 in Augusta, Georgia.

TJ became a standout high school student student and golfer.

Some people might donate reluctantly. Edwards says they were exuberant: never a moment of hesitation then nor a moment of regret in the 11 years since then — which is not to say nothing is different.

“If I put something into my body, like medications or supplements or something like that, I just have to do a lot of research,” Edwards said — no Dayquil or Nyquil for a kidney donor, for example.

But for the most part, life is normal — or you might say extraordinary, in the sense that Edwards is not only healthy but is among the best weightlifters in their age and weight class in America.

Edwards says becoming a living organ donor — a rare person who gets a chance to see someone benefit from their donation while still walk this earth — should be even more of a no-brainer now than it was back then.

That’s because nephrectomies — the process of taking a kidney out of the donor — are now done robotically at some hospitals, including at UPMC Harrisburg, which means even shorter hospital stays and recovery times for donors.

Back in 2000 when Becca Brown, UPMC’s transplant services director, first got involved in the program, donors faced a nearly a week in the hospital and then a long recovery after that.

“They had a very large incision, and they were very uncomfortable,” Brown said. “Then we moved to laparoscopic donor nephrectomy, and the incisions were much smaller. Patients were in the hospital 2 to 3 days.”

That’s exactly the kind Edwards had and exactly how long they were in the hospital.

But now, with the robot?

“Some of them are going home within 24 hours of donation” and without requiring any narcotic painkillers,” Brown said.

Another major advance in the field is more logistical than technical.

“When I first started in transplant, you’d have someone called and say, ‘I want to donate a kidney to my dad,’ and they were the wrong blood type, it didn’t go past that conversation,” Brown said.

But now there’s what she called a “game-changer”: a living donor match program.

“We will find someone who can use your kidney, and then your person would get a kidney from another living donor that is compatible,” Brown said. “So we’re essentially swapping donors.”

Anyone can register here.

Every procedure has risks, and donating a kidney is no exception. But Edwards’s experience is common.

Brown if the relatively benign impact of donating a kidney seems surprising, what’s important to understand is: It’s not that everyone could donate a kidney and go on living as normally as Edwards has done. It’s that living donor transplant programs screen prospective donors so thoroughly — Edwards remembers a hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, drawing 19 vials of blood from them in a day — that the people who are approved are in excellent health and thus have excellent chances of a result similar to Edwards’s.

One interesting anomaly here in the Midstate?

Nationally, “the majority of people who need a kidney transplant get their kidneys through deceased donation,” Brown said. “We are fortunate in here in central Pennsylvania, at our transplant center, almost half of our donors are living donors. We have some very generous people in this area.”

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