Doctors attempts to make kidney donation less painful for a mother of three apparently worked.
Having her kidney removed via her vagina, Kim Johnson says, was less painful than childbirth.
The forty-eight-year-old was the first woman to ever have her organ removed in this manner, a procedure performed by doctors at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland this week.
Johnson went in for the procedure so she could donate her kidney to her niece, twenty-three-year-old Jennifer Gilbert who received a kidney twelve years ago from her father. Gilbert's body began rejecting her father's kidney, prompting a need for another transplant.
Besides the necessary tissue match between the relatives, Johnson was a prime candidate for the experimental procedure because she'd undergone a hysterectomy since the birth of her three children. But doctors say they should be able to do the procedure on women without compromising their chances to give birth later, and the success of Johnson's surgery should encourage more women to become kidney donors.
Organ donation by live donors is dropping (despite all the attempts by donor organizations), but patients in the United States waiting for a kidney passed the one hundred thousand mark for the first time ever last fall. On the other hand, the overall number of transplants has increased more than eleven percent since
2003, while deaths on the transplant wait list have decreased
each year since 2004. And now states are weighing in on the process, many kicking in tax credits for live donors.
Another big plus for busy moms? Recovery time for this surgery was significantly less than the traditional laproscopic removal of a kidney. Johnson should be out and about at her normal routine within the next week and a half.
Not that I'm planning a big kidney birthing anytime soon, but, hey, you never know.
Image/Source: MSNBC
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