In high school, I was always sick. It was very hard to do school when you’re tired
all the time, you tried diet medications. But my kidney functions just kept getting
worse. A senior in high school is when I started on dialysis and that was very hard for me
to accept. It’s very grueling and the first time you see that thing, it’s just like
a monster. I had swollen up so bad with fluids that the first day I was on dialysis for six
hours, they took 14 pounds off of me (that was just fluid weight). Transplantation, they
had never heard of that. I’d never heard of it. I had no idea what to expect.
The kidney transplant program began 40 years ago and for those people who recall what 40
years ago was like in transplantation (that would’ve been 1970). In 1970, people with
chronic renal failure suffered a lot.
Forty years ago, they only transplanted those people that were the best candidates. They
didn’t have a lot of other medical problems. They were young, they were otherwise healthy.
Their only problem was that they had kidney disease.
I was fortunate within three months they called me for the transplant. I had just graduated
from high school. It was June 4th, 1974.
When Viola was transplanted, it was very common for people to be in the hospital for a long
time.
I was almost two months before I could go home and my family couldn’t come see me
for at least the first three weeks.
Patients were told they could expect to be in the hospitals for weeks or even months
at a time after the transplant procedure. Now our length to say averages about four
days.
Patients back then were in isolation, their family was limited, they weren’t allowed
to sit (they could only lay or stand).
Around the mid 1980s, new staff showed up; tremendous innovations occurred in transplantation.
And the program has really began to really evolve and explode.
As transplant has grown, as our physicians have gained more experience, as medications
have improved, we’re able to transplant people who fall outside of those perfect parameters.
We see people with heart disease, we see people who previously had cancer.
The key for kidney in the future is really our goal to get more people transplanted.
There is an epidemic of chronic renal failure in the United States. And there’s no question
that people on dialysis don’t do nearly as well as those patients who can benefit
from transplantation.
Dialysis is clearly an important therapy. It can keep people alive who would otherwise
die of kidney failure. But over time, it can be hard on the body, hard on the blood vessels
and the heart. What studies have consistently shown is that patients who receive a kidney
transplant and therefore get off dialysis can expect to live longer. They also generally
report a better quality of life if you’re interested in healthcare economics. It costs
less to take care of people who get a kidney transplant. We encourage essentially all of
our kidney transplant candidates to investigate whether there’s a potential living donor
available.
And most of our kidney transplants are living donations. Which means that a family member
or friend or even at times stranger can donate a kidney to someone who needs one. And we’re
now able to do that through minimally invasive surgery through the laparoscope. And essentially
these people only need an incision in their side large enough so that we can actually
remove the kidney from the body. That alone has revolutionized the entire landscape of
kidney transplantation.
Our program is very strong because we have tremendous support; we have good neurologists
throughout the city and throughout the state. They make timely referrals for their patients,
looking out for the best interests of their patients. It takes a lot of people to do kidney
transplants. It takes surgeons and neurologists and infectious diseases and GI folks and coordinators
and mid-levels. The list just goes on and on. And we have all the pieces that it takes
to take care of those patients.
All the pieces are in place here at Nebraska for true transplant center, not just a physician
who can manage medicine or a surgeon who can do the operation.
We’re much more cutting-edge.
We do blood type incompatibles. We’re doing all of these switches, we can have three different
people who want to donate into three different family members and they can all swap kidneys
so that all these three people who ordinarily wouldn’t match can all benefit from kidney
transplantation.
We’re doing antibody reduction for those people who have developed antibodies against
foreign tissues. We transplant; if somebody’s had two transplants, we’ll consider them
for a third.
When we’ve started to do more and more outreach, recognizing that we transplant patients commonly
who live anywhere from 4 to 8 hours drive away, with the thought being if we take a
surgeon and a physician and a couple nurses to a clinic four or five hours west of Omaha,
we can save a lot of people a lot of driving, a lot of effort, provide a more personal service
to them and we get good feedback every time we go to an outreach clinic.
We’ve been very fortunate to recruit and retain some of the finest physicians from
throughout the United States and combine them with a phenomenal staff who allows us to the
really cool stuff that we’re here to do. At its core, we all do what we do for what’s
really important and that’s our ability to take these desperately ill patients (dying
patients) and give them a second chance at life.
Those transplant reunions are probably way more emotional for the staff than the patients
will ever know. And when I leave from that reunion, my cup is running over; it is very
exciting the fact that she still has a functioning kidney (it’s amazing, it’s wonderful).
I’ve been very fortunate I’ve not had any problems; very fortunate.