Durban - A newly married Pietermaritzburg couple have more than just tied the knot – Samantha Dickinson, 27, has given her husband Graham, 29, one of her kidneys and saved his life.
The kidney transplant was done at St Augustine’s Hospital in Durban on Friday and both patients are recovering well but are still in ICU.
The technique used to harvest Samantha’s kidney is new for Durban.
Dr Preg Chetty with Dr Bala Govender performed the “laparoscopic live donor nephrectomy” on Samantha. He said the procedure was the “gold standard” worldwide.
“It is minimally invasive and allows us to harvest a kidney from a live patient through a tiny incision in their stomach,” said Chetty.
Previously kidneys used to be removed using highly invasive open surgery – a procedure which transplant surgeons believed stopped many people from donating organs and contributed to enormous donor shortages.
In today’s surgery, the kidney is extracted by making three 1cm incisions in the patient’s stomach and a 5cm incision along the patient’s bikini line as opposed to the traditional 25cm incision along a patient’s flank.
Donors also spend only three days in hospital compared to seven.
Samantha and Graham met six years ago, three years after Graham was diagnosed with an incurable kidney disease called IgA nephritis.
This occurs when an antibody immunoglobulin A (IgA) lodged in the kidneys, hampering the ability to filter waste, water and electrolytes from the blood and eventually leading to kidney failure.
Graham had his first transplant operation seven years ago when his father donated a kidney.
He told how his body accepted it for a few years, but the disease came back two years ago. Since then Graham has been going for dialysis up to three times a week.
When her boyfriend became ill again, Samantha decided to have herself tested to see if she would be a match for him.
“I was,” said Samantha, “I didn’t think twice about it. I was always going to do anything I could to help him.”
“We were not even engaged at the time, but that news just cemented the idea that we were meant for each other. The doctor told me his body would have more chance of accepting a kidney that did not come from a relative, so we were hopeful,” she said.
“It was a long process leading up to now. We started the tests a year ago but, even though I was a match, they still had to see if my body would be able to cope with one kidney.”
The Mercury