Kidney

The last thing Christopher "Bear" Bieniek saw when he closed his eyes yesterday morning was his mother's face and the operating room ceiling adorned with colorful stars.While the transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital was routine, the circumstances were highly unusual, as the 13-year-old eighth-grader from Aberdeen received a kidney from an Indiana woman whom -- until last week -- he'd never met.For Bieniek and his family, yesterday was the start of a new life."I'm so glad," said Terry Bieniek, the teen-ager's mother.

A national organ-sharing network withdrew sanctions yesterday that would have forced Maryland's primary transplant center to severely curb the use of kidneys for transplants in the state.The move was a pardon of sorts for the Maryland Transplant Resource Center and dozens of local patients awaiting kidney transplants who would have dropped to the bottom of a national waiting list for organs.The United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit group that holds a federal contract to enforce transplant policy nationwide, threatened in June to restrict Maryland's access to organs to reconcile the state's 67-kidney "debt."

"Prelude to a Scream," by Jim Nisbet. Carroll & Graf. 384 pages. $24. Jim Nisbet has taken an urban novel noir, folded in a grisly medical thriller, sprinkled on some literary pretensions for good measure, and come up with a impressively repulsive melange.Your own tastes should tell you whether to take this as a recommendation or a warning. The book's inventive spirit may please readers who can stomach aberrant behavior of the medical, sexual and ethical varieties. But even these hardy souls should immediately start practicing the fine art of suspending disbelief.

LAUREL -- After 25 years of suffering from diabetes, and after operations on both his eyes and both his feet, Jack Salter was given this grim choice by his doctors a few months ago: He could undergo a kidney transplant, or he could die within 90 days.Salter, 61, trains horses at Laurel racetrack. He's been doing it for 40 years. When he went to work a few days after his doctor's pronouncement, he bumped into Karen Young, who's a mutuel teller at the track. They've known each other for a couple of years, the way folks do who work at the same place and make small talk when they see each other.

Despite a monthlong stay in a Baltimore hospital, railroad-track incisions across her abdomen and various surgery-related illnesses, Darlene Ellen Jones relaxed in a rocker in her Union Bridge home and faced recovery from her recent pancreas transplant with humor and grace."

Ellen Jones, wife of Union Bridge Mayor Perry L. Jones Jr., is recuperating at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore after receiving a kidney from her mother, Irene Brown of Westminster, in transplant surgery Wednesday.Mrs. Brown, 63, was moved to a private room in the hospital shortly after the surgery. Mrs. Jones was moved to a semi-private room Friday. Both were in fair condition yesterday."The doctors expect her to make a full recovery, her and her mother," Mr. Jones said Friday.

Washington -- Since almost everything else is for sale, why not a market in healthy human kidneys and other organs that can be spared, taken from cash-hungry donors for transplanting into patients with ready cash?Why not? In India, Egypt and other third-world countries with centers of high-tech medicine, a booming trade in kidney transplants benefits wealthy patients and provides several thousand dollars for each donor.In the wealthy West, that may look like blood money, and little of it for what's involved.

Washington -- Organ-transplant techniques are increasingly sophisticated and successful. But kidneys and other transplantable organs are paradoxically scarce and plentiful. Every year, thousands of people die while awaiting transplants. Meanwhile, organs suitable for transplant from victims of fatal accidents and other suitable donors never make it into the medical system. Can the profit motive resolve this dilemma?Horrors. The profit motive as a factor in organ transplants? There's a federal law against selling organs.

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay -- Word got around after Pedro Riveroli, a poor laborer, sold his kidney to a wealthy merchant, and soon he had other offers. He sold his daughter's kidney to an ailing millionaire and his son-in-law's kidney to a retired teacher.Mr. Riveroli was bargaining away the kidneys of two jobless friends last week when police detained him and 19 others in what may be Latin America's first official crackdown on commerce in human organs.The case, dramatic evidence of the economic desperation reigning across the continent, has set off a debate over the ethics of organ donations in societies plagued by disparities in wealth.

A Mass of Christian burial for Dagmar M. Maszun, 39, who died after a heart attack Sunday at Francis Scott Key Medical Center, will be offered at 10:30 a.m. Friday at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church, 5502 York Road.Mrs. Maszun, who lived in Woodlawn, had suffered from kidney disease for many years. She had been active in recent weeks as an opponent of proposed budget reductions in the state's kidney dialysis program. The program was subsequently saved.Mrs. Maszun's husband, Joseph D. Morton Jr., said he did not think his wife's death was caused by her activities as a demonstrator and spokeswoman for dialysis patients.

Man fatally shot trying to disarm a police officer 3 A man was fatally shot last night while attempting to disarm a Southeastern District police officer who was investigating a report of a domestic situation, police said. The officer's name and that of the man were not released. Shortly before 9:15 p.m., the officer was talking to the man in the 2700 block of Orleans St. near Lakewood Avenue when he attacked the officer. Police said at least one area resident called police, telling them that the man had the officer on the ground and was holding her in a head-lock while trying to take her gun. Within minutes, several other officers responded.

Electric shock is used to start hearts that have stopped beating. In a pinch, would it be possible to start a heart using a stun gun? Doctors use defibrillators to shock a heart out of a life-threatening rhythm. A stun gun is NO substitute for a defibrillator! We consulted two cardiologists who both said this would not work and is a very bad idea. If you are concerned about needing a defibrillator "in a pinch," you can purchase an AED (automated external defibrillator). These home models detect life-threatening heart rhythms and use an electrical shock to restart the heart.

Last year, Landis Expandis felt creatively drained. After about 20 years as the lead singer and drummer for the local funk rock group All Mighty Senators, he was running low on subject matter for lyrics. "I couldn't come up with anything, and the stuff I did come up with was very sophomoric," said Expandis, whose real last name is McCord. "I didn't know anything else to write about." Then came Expandis' bout with pneumonia, which left his kidneys permanently operating at only 10 percent.

A. Robert Kaufman is closer to getting a kidney, no thanks to how he's listed in the phone book. Baltimore's most steadfast Socialist, who's always running for something, including mayor this year, has never persuaded many citizens to give him their votes. But someone who saw him in the televised mayoral debate in August wants to give him a kidney. Kaufman has been in need of a kidney and on dialysis ever since a near-fatal beating and stabbing in 2005. He never misses a chance to make a public plea for an organ.

Richard Cohen figured you could find just about anything you wanted these days, no matter how elusive or obscure, in the quick zip of an Internet search. So, with his health declining and all other options failing him, he typed into Google: I need a kidney. It was a shot in the dark, Cohen knew. But what else did he have? Several years after doctors diagnosed him with incurable kidney disease, his appetite, energy and hope were on a steady dwindle. The busy Connecticut attorney declined the traditional dialysis treatments, worrying that the physically draining sessions would impede his already eroding lifestyle.

A web of misfortune seems only to deepen for Baltimore's best-known Socialist, A. Robert Kaufman. The perennial candidate - who has never won an election - was nearly knifed to death last year by a tenant in his West Baltimore boarding house, and suffered kidney failure as a result of the injuries. Since then, he hasn't been shy about asking just about anyone - even his imprisoned attacker - for a kidney that might turn around his health. And now, like deja vu, he's been attacked again, by another tenant.

Of course the five-kidney, 10-patient transplant extravaganza at Johns Hopkins Hospital got on the CBS Evening News last month. A dozen surgeons worked all day to fulfill a complex, "my relative will give you a kidney if your relative gives me a kidney" contract that pushed the bounds of clinical logistics. "A huge medical story," said Katie Couric. "A surgical square dance," said CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. A "triumph of the human spirit," transplant director Dr. Robert Montgomery told The Sun. And yet the heroics barely skimmed the ocean of desperate people needing kidneys.

Five kidney patients from across the country have received new organs from five unrelated living donors in what doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital called the first five-way kidney swap in medical history. The 10 surgeries took place last week in an all-day marathon that required more than 100 surgeons, nurses and others working simultaneously in five operating rooms. All of the patients were recovering yesterday, and several were wheeled into a news conference, where they expressed gratitude to doctors and donors for a new lease on life - and amazement at the scope of the medical enterprise.

A 43-year-old man pleaded guilty yesterday to trying to kill A. Robert Kaufman, a Baltimore landlord and long-shot candidate for the U.S. Senate who was clubbed with a crowbar and stabbed in a rent dispute with one of his tenants. After a Circuit Court judge sentenced Henry Leon Davis to 12 years in prison, Kaufman turned to the defendant and asked him for a kidney donation. The socialist and perennial candidate for public office has said that his kidneys failed because of blood poisoning from the knife used in the attack.

In the news Pierce Brosnan's license to kill is revoked A single, surprising phone call and it was over. That's how Pierce Brosnan says he learned that his services as James Bond would no longer be required. "One phone call, that's all it took!" the 52-year-old actor tells Entertainment Weekly magazine in its Aug. 19 issue. "You know, the movie career for me really started with Bond," says Brosnan, acknowledging that by the time GoldenEye premiered in 1995, he was already 42. He then starred as 007 in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)