Her gift of life helps a stranger

Corrie Lynn Wright watched her stepfather waste away from kidney disease for more than 15 years, dying when she was 24 years old.

She says that experience is what compelled her to undergo surgery this month to give away a kidney to save a stranger's life while asking nothing in return.

"Some people will never understand what I did," said Wright, a Topeka wife and mother of two. "But some people can, because they know people on dialysis, or they have watched a loved one fall apart from another disease."

Wright, 34, said Friday that before donating her kidney, she had thought for a long time about taking that step.

She made the donation in memory of her stepfather, Jerry Sommerville, who she calls "the only dad I ever knew."

Sommerville, a retired military man suffering from kidney problems brought on by diabetes, was never healthy enough to be placed on a list of people eligible to receive a donated kidney, Wright said. He died in Topeka at age 60 in May 2001.

Wright said Sommerville spent more than 15 years on dialysis, a procedure in which an outside machine is used to perform the functions of kidneys that no longer work.

"Dialysis kind of wears the body down," Wright said. "His body started shutting down, organ by organ."

Wright said it was about a year ago that she went online to investigate possibly becoming a kidney donor. She said the searches she conducted all led to one site, that of the National Kidney Registry.

Wright said that site educated her about what she needed to do to donate a kidney. She submitted an inquiry, and a representative from the registry called back. Soon afterward, Wright began fulfilling 10 requirements to become a donor.

John Milner, the physician who performed Wright's surgery at Chicago's Loyola Medicine, said about 85,000 people are awaiting kidney transplants in the United States, where about 15,000 kidney transplant surgeries are conducted each year. Of those, about half of the kidneys come from deceased donors and about half from living donors, he said.

While most living donors give a kidney to a relative or friend, Milner said this country sees about 150 "altruistic donors" a year who give a kidney to a stranger.

Those donors include Wright, who said she learned last month that her kidney was a match for a patient on the list of eligible recipients.

Then came bad news. That person wasn't healthy enough to receive a transplant.

But Wright got another call soon afterward, on Sept. 23, saying another recipient had been found. Her kidney removal surgery was scheduled for Oct. 1 at Loyola Medicine as part of its Pay-It-Forward program for altruistic donors, which is the first of its kind in the Midwest.

Wright and her husband, Teddy, went Sept. 28 to Chicago, where she underwent further tests to ensure the transplant could work. She was then hospitalized the night of Sept. 30 before undergoing a six-hour surgery to remove a kidney Oct. 1.

Wright said she will never forget meeting the recipient this past Monday, just before she returned home and three days after surgery.

The kidney went to a man named "John," who Wright said appeared to be in his middle 40s and is married with children.

Milner said John was working as a traveling cellular phone representative in the Midwest when "one day he found that his kidney function wasn't there any more and he needed a kidney. Suddenly, he was only a couple of dialysis treatments from not being here any more."

John had relatives willing to donate a kidney but none physically healthy enough to do so, Milner said.

Wright said that at the time she donated her kidney, John was receiving dialysis five times a week.

John received Wright's kidney the same day it was removed, Wright said.

"The doctor said that had he not received a kidney, he would have died," she said.

Teddy Wright said John was clearly awe-struck and overcome with gratitude when he met Corrie Wright.

"His eyes told it all," Teddy White said. "There was so much joy in his eyes."

Corrie Wright said John told her she had given him a newfound faith in the goodness of people.

"He said I was his angel, and he didn't think that people were like that any more," she said.

Corrie Wright said John voiced concern about the burden he had placed on her and her family.

She said she replied: "Look, John. This is exactly what I wanted to do."

Wright said her personal experience of coping with her stepfather's disease helped her appreciate that her kidney donation would help more than just John.

"I feel like I was able to touch his whole family," she said.

Wright compared the experience of being a kidney donor with that of giving birth to her children.

"It's powerful," she said. "I can't explain."

Wright said she asked John about the first thing he was going to do now that he had a new kidney.

She recalled: "He said he was going to get a full-time job so he could support his family. And I have no doubt in my mind that that man will do something good with the rest of his life."

Milner said kidney donors experience physical pain for the first few days after removal and their energy "will be down for a few weeks."

Still, he said, donors should be able to return to desk jobs after three or four weeks or to hard labor after four to six weeks.

After six to nine months, Milner said, donors no longer notice their surgery's physical effects.

Corrie Wright said Friday that though her energy level remained low, she managed to come home Monday and walk around her block Thursday. She plans to return later this month to her job as a manager in the city's department of housing and neighborhood development.

Wright said she also is pursuing her "new passion" of spreading the word about the kidney registry and encouraging people to become donors. The surgery came at no financial cost to her, she said.

She stressed that physically, people don't need both of their kidneys.

"Once a kidney is removed, your other kidney grows to compensate for that missing kidney," Wright said.

She also said kidney donation doesn't shorten a donor's life, and kidney removal is about as dangerous as many surgeries people undergo for purely cosmetic reasons.

Kidney donors have a 1 in 3,000 chance of dying during surgery and a 1 in 1,500 chance of needing a kidney transplant themselves at some point, Milner said.

"That's not because you donate," he said of the latter figure. "That's the general risk as if you were part of the general population. And if you ever need a transplant, you would go right to the top of the waiting list."

Wright said that as she often refers to her late stepfather in casual conversation as her "dad," people suggest at times that she shouldn't have donated a kidney because she might be genetically susceptible to kidney disease. She said she tells them Sommerville was actually her stepfather, and kidney disease hasn't been present in her biological family.

Teddy Wright said that when he and his wife tell people about how she gave away a kidney, some see her act as being strange, while others feel amazed she did something so selfless and meaningful.

He said, "One of my friends said, 'You tell Corrie, 'Wow!' "