“I don’t know what I’m going to say,” Eida C. admits, a few minutes before she’s scheduled to meet the anonymous donor who gave her a kidney. She received her transplant less than two weeks before this meeting, after having been on the list for four years.
She’s nervous, she admits, but there’s no mistaking her gratitude. Finding out she’d been chosen for a transplant meant “a new life,” she explains. “I was so happy.”
For Christie G., Eida's donor, choosing to donate her kidney was “the only way to go.” She was diagnosed with Nutcracker syndrome, a rare condition that occurs when the vein coming from the left kidney is compressed by two arteries.
“The solution is to move that vein so it’s no longer compressed,” Christie says. “But if you do so, you also have to move the kidney. They could’ve put the kidney on the other side of my body, but I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and a complex medical history, so I didn’t want that, because I was worried about the risk of failure. I knew that removing my kidney would be the best overall solution for me—and that by donating it, I could provide a solution to someone else’s problem, too.”
Christie wasn’t a Temple Health patient when she was diagnosed with Nutcracker syndrome, but when she was researching treatment options, she soon found Kenneth Chavin, MD, MBA, PhD, FACS, Director of the Abdominal Organ Transplant Program at Temple University Hospital and Professor and Vice Chair of Research in Surgery at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University.
“Dr. Chavin is highly recommended,” she says. “His office told me to send in my records and test results as soon as possible, and my husband drove them down that day. I was able to have a virtual visit the next week.”
Her experience at Temple, Christie says, has been “wonderful. When you have something like Nutcracker syndrome, a lot of people don’t know what it is, or they think you’re faking the debilitating symptoms. But that’s not the case here. Patients are understood the second they meet the Temple team.”
Strangers No More
Christie’s and Eida’s exam rooms are on opposite sides of the hallway, and when it’s time to meet, they’re both hesitant to come out. But after a few seconds, they turn the corner and see each other—and immediately, they embrace.
They introduce themselves, sharing basic details: their names, where they’re from, how long it took them to get to the hospital. They talk about how they’re feeling after surgery, and what the recovery process has been like. Eida thanks Christie, and starts to cry.
Christie takes out her phone and shows a photo: her kidney after it was removed, but before it was transplanted into Eida. The two women stare at it for a moment: at something that belonged to one of them, and is now keeping the other alive.
Someone asks if they would be open to keeping in touch. Yes, Eida and Christie say. They would like that.