He said he hopes that more transplant centers will be willing to engage in these domino transplants, to maximize the number of transplants that can be made possible by one altruistic donor.
In the past, donors in these situations have been asked to travel at their own expense to the hospital where the recipient was located. Montgomery prefers the kidneys themselves do the flying. The biggest limitation in the number of transplants being done, he said, is that there simply aren't enough kidneys to go around. More than 100,000 people are on waiting lists for kidneys. Live donors are preferable to donations of kidneys from the deceased because their kidneys last longer and tend to work better right from the start.
"A transplant surgeon can maybe do 2,000 surgeries in a lifetime," he said. "The work that we're doing here will be responsible for thousands and thousands of transplants.
"What could be better?"
The first transplant in this chain took place on June 15, when Koontz's kidney went to 52-year-old Kathleen Wolstenholme at Hopkins. The next day, Wolstenholme's sister, Theresa Watson, 53, gave her kidney to Robert Brinkmann, a 58-year-old Rockville attorney. Meanwhile, his wife Lisa's kidney was flown to Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital, where it was implanted into 57-year-old Daniel Bruce.
On the third day of transplants - June 22 - kidneys crisscrossed the country, sent among Hopkins, Henry Ford, Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis and INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City, Okla. The kidney donated by Pamela Paulk, a Hopkins executive who was the subject of an article in The Baltimore Sun last week, went to a recipient in St. Louis. In exchange, her co-worker Robert Imes received a kidney from Oklahoma City.
All of the recipients are expected to make full recoveries.Robert Brinkmann was diagnosed with kidney disease two years ago, and it became clear in the last several months that he would need a transplant. For six months he had spent three days a week, four hours at a time hooked up to a dialysis machine. Even on dialysis he didn't feel quite right, often fatigued or queasy. His new wife, Lisa, offered her kidney without hesitation.
"It was totally a selfish reason on my part," she said. "I wanted my husband back."
Their surgeries took place on June 16. They will celebrate their first anniversary on July 19.
"There's a gratitude that's hard to describe," he said.
Koontz, whose donation was the first domino to fall, is humble about his role in all of this. The Fredericksburg, Va., man said by phone Tuesday that he is simply happy that his daughter Sage is doing so well, that Wolstenholme was able to get the kidney she needed and that her mother was so thankful for his gift, and that he should be healed enough by next week to go running again.
"God helped me, so I was trying to give something back to God," he said. "You only need one kidney."
