Husband takes gift-giving season to heart - and kidney 

Collin, left, and Jacki Bruce, are shown in their Smithfield home on Thursday, Dec. 1, 2011. They are going to be participants in a "kidney swap," the first one that Sentara Norfolk General Hospital is performing in the area. They are husband and wife, but not compatible transplant-wise, so Collin is donating his kidney to someone else, and Jacki's receiving a kidney from someone out of state. (Steve Earley | The Virginian-Pilot)

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He wants to donate one of his kidneys to Jacki, who's 46, so she won't need the six-hour, overnight procedure, but different blood types keep them from being a good match.

Tuesday, though, the Smithfield couple will participate in the region's first "paired kidney exchange" at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.

In the morning, Collin, 41, will have one of his healthy kidneys removed, which will be packed in ice, put in a cooler and flown out of state for someone who is a match for his organ.

In the afternoon, Jacki will receive a kidney from someone she doesn't know, also from out of state, who is donating an organ that's compatible with her blood type about the same time Collin is having his removed.

The first such paired kidney swap in the United States was performed in 2000, and since then hundreds have been performed across the country. Donors and recipients who are poor matches with their own relative or loved ones agree to swap organs with others to create more compatible matches.

According to a federal database, there have been 1,470 paired transplants to date, 268 this year alone. A number of local residents have participated in them, but at other hospitals, such as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

The concept has caught on quickly, and given people new hope for shorter waits for organs. In some cases, so-called "Good Samaritan" donors have stepped forward to give a kidney to a stranger that then starts a chain of paired donations, some involving more than 30 donors and recipients.

Trying to catch that momentum, Sentara Norfolk General Hospital joined the National Kidney Registry about four years ago in hopes of speeding the time it takes their patients to get a kidney.

That registry was started in 2007 by Garet Hil, whose 10-year-old daughter suffered kidney failure in New York state. He wanted to donate his kidney to her, but he wasn't a match. Eventually another relative stepped in, but Hil went on to found a registry to match up pairs of people to create compatible matches. Last year, the registry helped coordinate 130 transplants, a number that's expected to increase to 200 this year.

There are now 53 medical centers in the network, and the wait time has gone from 3.8 years for a match in 2008 to eight months.

The wait time for kidneys from people who have died, on the other hand, is four to six years at Sentara, a wait that has lengthened over the years because of the growing number of people in need of kidneys. The diabetes epidemic has led to more cases of kidney failure, increasing demand for the organs.

Betty Crandall, director of Sentara's Transplant Center, said kidneys from living donors last longer, on average, than those from deceased donors. There are a number of paired kidney exchange registries throughout the country. United Network for Organ Sharing started a pilot project in 2010, in hopes of paring down the wait for the 90,000 people needing a kidney nationwide.

Sentara selected the National Kidney Registry because of the large number of hospitals and people who were signed up.

"The more pairs you have in a registry, the more chances you have to match an individual patient," Crandall said.

The Bruces were the first on the local list in August 2010. Three others are on the list, out of the 600 people on Sentara's regular waiting list for kidneys. Crandall believes there will eventually be a national registry, which would increase the possibility for matches.

Jacki was diagnosed with diabetes in late 2005, the same year she and Collin married. The next year, her kidneys began failing, forcing her onto dialysis in 2007. She quit her job as a massage therapist because she didn't have the energy or strength to do the work properly.

She had dialysis at a center for a year, and then switched to an at-home dialysis treatment.

Shortly after going on dialysis, she was put on the transplant list for a kidney. Her husband was not a match for her, nor was her mother or brother. Last year, though, they learned about the kidney-paired-donation idea. Collin was tested in the spring of 2010 and found to be a good donor, so the couple were added to the paired-kidney registry in August of the same year. Jacki has type O blood, which made the search a little more difficult because she needed an organ from someone with the same type.

On Oct. 16, Jacki received a call that a match had been found.

"It was a jump-up-and-down-for-joy, throw-a-party moment," Jacki said.

Since then, they've both gone through more testing. Collin arranged to take sick leave from his engineering work at Dominion Power. Doctors say he will recover in four to six weeks. Jacki will take longer, about two or three months.

In a year, if all parties are agreeable, they can learn the identities of the person who is donating a kidney to Jacki, and the person who will receive Collin's organ on Tuesday. Sentara's one-year wait policy gives all parties time to heal and weigh their desires to meet one another.

"I'd love to thank the person who's donating to me," Jacki said.

Mostly though, she's thankful to her husband for stepping forward. Neither Jacki nor Collin has ever had a surgery.

"The fact that he loves me so much he is willing to go through a major surgery and give up a part of his body is unfathomable," she said.

The couple wanted to go public with their story to give hope to other people on the waiting list and to also encourage healthy people to donate a kidney. Those in good health need only one kidney to live.

Collin hopes a new kidney will give Jacki more energy, less pain and freedom from her every-other-day dialysis: "I'm looking forward to her having a kidney that works, so she can go back to the life she had. I won't have to stick her with big needles anymore."

Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635, elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com