Kidney Transplant

"I'm thankful for every day," says Michael Jessup Jr.Two days before Thanksgiving last year, Jessup, 34, a fund-raiser at Salisbury State University, received a kidney transplant from his brother, Mark."So this Thanksgiving, I am thankful for being able to enjoy life with my wife, daughter, family and friends," he says. "You never know when life might end."That daughter, Emily, was born just two months before his transplant operation last year. Two weeks ago, his brother Mark's daughter, Alex Marie, was born.

IN THE SHORT RUN, the agreement reached this week between the Maryland Transplant Resource Center and a national organ-sharing network is good news. Patients awaiting kidney transplants won't become victims of an internecine battle that would have forced them to the bottom of the national waiting list for donor organs.And if -- as the agreement calls for -- there's increased local attention paid to the pressing need for organ donors, all of us will benefit.Unfortunately, a bigger problem has yet to be adequately addressed.

WASHINGTON -- Nancy Nearing gave at the office. And I do not mean the United Way. The 42-year-old Virginia mother of two gave a kidney. To her boss.To put it as simply as she did, "I had a choice of either wringing my hands and saying, 'Oh, dear,' or doing something about it."For six years, the technical writer, had worked in Rockville on a computer programming team headed by Art Helms. When she heard that he was about to lose his kidneys to a genetic disease, she decided to help. But hers was a help far beyond flowers or even a pint of blood, much more than a get-well card.

A national organ-sharing network is threatening sanctions that could severely curb the state's ability to obtain kidneys for local transplants -- a move that could have life-or-death consequences for scores of patients in Maryland.Two of Maryland's most prominent hospitals -- Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the University of Maryland Medical Center -- have been so successful in their transplant programs that they have inadvertently helped give the state the largest kidney "debt" in the nation.

KARUIZAWA, Japan -- One minute, Mike Peplinski is talking about rocks, brooms and gaining a gold medal for the United States.The next, he is speaking of doctors and pills and his upcoming kidney transplant."

CHICAGO -- At 56 years old, Luis Esparza Sr. feels like a "new man," and for that he thanks Luis Esparza Jr. and the four tiny incisions his son now sports on his abdomen as well as a 3-inch cut near his belly button.Through the smaller holes, doctors slipped a tiny camera and surgical tools. They then slipped one of the younger Esparza's kidneys, drained of blood, through the larger hole. The organ was then transplanted into his ailing father.This relatively new and less traumatic procedure for taking kidneys from a living donor was tried at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago last week for the first time.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, 49, Pakistan's top classical singer, died yesterday in a London hospital, to which he had been admitted last wee suffering from hepatitis. He died of a cardiac arrest. His body is to be flown back to Pakistan for a funeral. Pakistan's official APP news agency said the singer left Pakistan for the United States last week for a kidney transplant but stopped for a few days in London, where his condition deteriorated. He popularized the subcontinent's traditional qawali form o music and semiclassical Pakistani music by mixing it with popular modern beats.

Dr. Curtis E. Davis, founding director of the renal dialysis program at Bon Secours Hospital, died of a heart attack Tuesday his Columbia home. He was 61.Coming to Baltimore in 1978 to head the old Lutheran Hospital's Rosemont Community Doctors Center, Dr. Davis gave up a lucrative private practice in Minneapolis, where for 12 years he was also a full-time kidney specialist on the staff of the University of Minnesota-Veterans Administration Medical Center.In...

Farces are deceptive creatures. They seem like froth, but they're among the more difficult dramatic genres to write and perform.At the Vagabonds, where John Morogiello's "Keeping It Aloft" is receiving its premiere as part of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, there were enough opening-night glitches to upset the delicate mechanism of any farce.But Morogiello's script also has problems. These begin with the characters, who are so downright stupid that it's difficult to get caught up in the spiraling action.

Should people who are responsible for their diseases receive the same consideration for organ transplantation as those who develop diseases through no fault of their own?Debates about making people suffer the consequences of their voluntary, unhealthy lifestyle choices recently surfaced when Mickey Mantle received a transplant to replace his liver, which had been severely compromised by years of heavy alcohol abuse. Concern also was expressed that Mr. Mantle, because of his "hero" status as a former New York Yankee star, received special treatment when he received a liver after beingon the waiting list for only 24 hours.