It sounds like one of those logical brainteasers that almost no one can solve: You have three pairs whose partners don't match each other but might match members of other pairs. By shuffling, can you come up with three perfect matches?
The answer was a happy "yes" at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where 15 doctors operated on six patients over 11 hours Monday to transplant three healthy kidneys into three desperate recipients.
The "triple switch" was almost certainly the first such maneuver in history, Johns Hopkins officials said. As of yesterday afternoon, all six participants were safe and comfortable.
"Logistically, this was monumental," said surgeon Robert A. Montgomery, who led the transplant team and operated on two of the six. "We were all truly amazed that it worked out."
The complex transaction boiled down to a barter among three pairs of people. Each twosome consisted of someone who needed a kidney and someone willing to give up a kidney. Each pair already knew each other, or were related, and were willing to be transplant partners. But because their blood and tissues didn't match, transplants between them wouldn't work.
So they turned to Hopkins' Incompatible Kidney Transplant Program, which cross-matches such donor-recipient pairs. Since 2001, Hopkins has performed four double transplants this way, but this was the first time it took three pairs to get everyone matched perfectly.
How did the exchange work?
Let's start with Tracy Stahl, an Appleby's waitress with two kids from Johnstown, Pa., who got her new kidney from Julia Tower, an educational consultant from Hyattsville.
Tower's partner and family friend, 13-year-old Jeremy Weiser-Warschoff of Silver Spring, in turn got a kidney from Paul Boissiere, a 30-year-old electrical engineer from Trinidad who lives in Coral Gables, Fla.
Meanwhile, Boissiere's fiancee, accountant Germaine Allum, 30, in turn got a kidney from Connie Dick, 41, a contractor from Latrobe, Pa., who happens to be Tracy Stahl's sister.
Did you follow that?
Speaking publicly for the first time at a news conference yesterday at the hospital, five of the patients laughed, cried and thanked their doctors - and each other. The only one missing, seventh-grader Jeremy, stayed in his hospital room to save energy for playing pool later in the day.
"She gave me my life back," said Tracy Stahl, 39, looking at Julia Tower, 57, who lay in a gurney a few feet away.
