The Life-saving Nine-way Kidney Transplant
February 19th, 2018 by admin
Sometimes there are days where you're reminded of the good that a few people can bring about. When a patient needed a kidney transplant and his brother offered, it started a process that ended in nine different people across the country receiving kidneys through the National Kidney Registry.
One of our valued transplant surgeons at Kidney Care, Dr. George Lipkowitz, is Director of Transplantation at Baystate Medical Center. He started the program 30 years ago, which has since performed over a 1000 kidney transplants. Last year, the program was part of a touching story shared recently by MassLive. Michael Dancosse needed a new kidney and his brother Matthew offered to be a live donor. That kidney, however, was found to be incompatible with Michael's body. Thanks to the National Kidney Registry, the two brothers were part of a nine-way kidney transplant, so that Matthew's kidney was sent to a patient in Colorado and Michael received one from California.
In the article, Dr. Lipkowitz shared that "The way it works is this: if we do testing and find that a patient is incompatible with a donor, we register them in the National Kidney Registry and put both the donor and recipient in. The pair gets matched against all other institutions doing the same thing. It matched up with all these people -- if one kidney goes to one recipient, another can go to a different recipient -- like a domino game." This helps patients who would otherwise spend potentially a decade on the transplant waiting list.
We're delighted to see the vital work of our doctors turn into such happy stories. That's why we support the work of the National Kidney Registry in matching donors and recipients across the country.
Learn more about our transplant care and services »
Posted in: About, Transplants