2006年NPR美国国家公共电台十一月-Kidney Donors Meet Recipients

This is “Day to Day,” I'm Alex Chadwick . Today, Thanksgiving, family gatherings 1 all across the country. But few will be as emotionally charged as a reunion earlier this week at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, five kidney transplant patients actually met their organ donors 3 for the first time. The five donors and five recipients 5 were all recovering after taking part in the first ever quintuple kidney transplant. NPR's Luke Burbank has more.

Sheila Thornton spent the last four years hook-up to a machine. Thanks to a condition you have probably never even heard of by its technique name. Focal segmental glomerulo sclerosis , in other words late stage kidney failure. During those four years Thornton was on the list for a transplant but a suitable match never appeared which is where the machines came in. First she was going to a Maryland hospital three days a week, five hours a day where she was hooked up for dialysis. Eventually though even that stopped working.
With different problems, with infections, then the grafts 6 that they put in, I switched to what they call peritoneal dialysis and you, I did it at home, ah, nine hours every night. But it's still that it’s not the same as having a kidney.

As Gerald Loevner of Sarasota, Florida knows all too well. After a series of open heart surgeries he suffered kidney failure too. His wife Sandy says it affects every aspect of your life.

It's amazing what you can't have including water; your foods have to be limited. We try to keep Gerald to three and a half cups of liquid a day, that includes anything that can turn to liquid, like jello 7.

Gerald Loevner was also on the transplant list and Sandy his wife was happy to give him her kidney. But they were not an ideal match. A fairly common situation says Doctor Robert Montgomery who directs the Johns Hopkins Transplant Center.

We had four, err 8, different couples that came to us and each had a willing donor 2 but there was an incompatibility 9 between the donor and the recipient 4.
Things were not looking great for these people or for Sheila Thornton who by now was just hoping to get a kidney from a cadaver 10 also not the ideal situation.

And that's where Honey Rothstein came in.
That's right. Honey Rothstein, a 48 years old IRS employee from West Virginia who decided 11 2 Thanksgivings ago, that she wanted to donate a kidney to someone who needed it in honor of her late daughter.
Sometimes you just have to do what, what feels good in your heart. I mean, you do what's right in your heart and you think, you know, maybe I can, I can do something good for somebody.

Rothstein probably had no idea though just how much good she was about to do. You see, Honey Rothstein's kidney fit like the missing piece to a puzzle, it matched a woman named Christian 12 Jantzi of Maine that meant Jantzi 's adoptive mother Florence could give her kidney to a better match. A guy named Jeorge Brooks 13. In turn, Jeorge Brooks's wife Sharon was able to donate her kidney to a more ideal candidate, a fellow name Gary Persell, whose wife Leslie then gave her kidney to Gerald Loevner, the guy from Sarasota, which meant his wife Sandy could now give her kidney to, you guessed it, Sheila Thornton.

So Mrs. Thonrto so far how is the Sandy Loevner's kidney doing? How's it feeling?
Oh wow. Ha.... It is wonderful. It is wonderful.
Does that make you kind of proud, Sandy, that you were, you know you were taking good care that kidney for 63 years, and now someone else is getting to use it?
It does, I got to tell you that lady is used to a lot of water, that’s all I can tell you. We live in Florida where it's hot and that kidney has been well exercised.

All ten surgeries were performed on the same afternoon last week by Doctor Montgomery and his Johns Hopkin team. It took 12 surgeons, six operating rooms and a staff of over 100, but in the end they'd managed a quintuple kidney transplant which by all accounts is some kind of new record. Records aside , doctor Montgomery says there is a legitimate 14 reason all the surgeries needed to happen at once.

To remove the variable of , you know, something happening that would hold-up some of the operation and you know someone might donate a kidney and their loved one not get one.
Doctor Montgomery says it was only after he'd finished all the surgeries as he looked at a complicated diagram of who got which kidney that it hit him.
I mean that, I will never forget that, that moment when I actually had the realization 15 of what we had accomplished 16. It was, ah, it was very cool.

So cool, in fact, that Doctor Montgomery says that one moment made all those years of medical school, all those sleep deprived hours as a resident worth it. And for the patients all of whom are recovering well, the record-breaking procedure means freedom from dialysis machines, freedom to drink more than 3.5 cups liquid a day and a lifelong bond with someone who until last week was a complete stranger. Luke Burbank, NPR news.

Thank you, Loevner, I'll be in touch, Sheila, thank you. Thank you for making Thanksgiving special.
Thank you.
Bye, Honey
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quintuple
五的, 五倍的, 五部分组成的
sclerosis
[医]硬化症, 硬化, 硬结
glomerulosclerosis
n.肾血管球硬化症
dialysis
[化] 透析, 分离,血液透析
peritoneal.
腹膜的
cadaver
死尸, 尸体
IRS
abbr.
Internal Revenue Service 美国国税局
by all accounts
adv.
据大家所说