It took 12 surgeons, six operating rooms and five donors to perform a quintuple kidney swap, but five desperate strangers simultaneously received new organs in the first-ever quintuple kidney transplant.
All five recipients, two women and three men are doing fine, and the five organ donors, all women, are also doing finem, said Eric Vohr, a spokesman at the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Center. These 10 participants were from Canada, Maine, Maryland, West Virginia, California and Florida.
Several triple transplants have been performed earlier at Johns Hopkins, but the hospital officials said that the five simultaneous transplants performed on Tuesday were a first.
Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of Hopkins’ transplant center said that the interlocking deal is “a demonstration to the rest of the country that this is what’s possible when people work together” .
Sheila Thornton, 63, from Edgewood, said she felt ver happy and her joy was inexplicable when she learned that she would receive a kidney from Sandra Loevner, 63, whom she had never met before.
There was an altruistic donor, Honore Rothstein of Martinsburg, who decided to donate a kidney after losing her husband to a brain hemorrhage and her daughter to an overdose. She too did not know any of the recipients.
About 70,000 people in the United States are waiting for a kidney transplant. The wait will average about 5 years, during which time 30,000 of them will either die or become too sick for a transplant.
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