ROCHESTER, Minn. (KTTC) – March is National Kidney Donation month, a time for health experts to raise awareness and encourage others to become organ donors.
One Iowa woman is sharing her transplant story as she celebrates a big milestone this month, more than four decades since receiving a kidney from her sister.
On March 5th, 1980 Mary Roethler of Elma, Iowa received a kidney transplant in Rochester at the Mayo Clinic when she was just 15 years old.
This year marks the 42nd anniversary since that transplant.
“That’s what they tell me, every year they say your one kidney is functioning as well as two,” Roethler said.
Roethler was born with both kidneys fused together, a condition commonly referred to as ‘horseshoe kidney’.
“Before the transplant I was sick, I was thin, no energy,” Roethler said. “And then afterward you couldn’t slow me down. I felt great, it was like I was given a new life.”
“I remember when the doctors came in, and they said ‘it’s working! She’s looking so much better, and it’s working,” Roethler’s older sister Ruth Riha said. “So that was great.”
“They were really happy because the urine started flowing right away,” Roethler said.
When Roethler was told she would need a transplant, her search started within the family.
As it turned out, her sister Ruth was a ‘perfect’ match.
“Probably the best chance we have is with siblings because siblings have a one in four chance of matching each other really, really well being the so-called ‘perfect match’ from the tissue type standpoint,” Mayo Clinic Kidney Transplant Program Surgical Director Dr. Patrick Dean said. “And those are the transplants that tend to be most successful.”
Riha says she did the right thing and doesn’t regret her decision of becoming a living donor.
“It’s just something you do if you can, medically, if you’re healthy and feel good enough to do it for someone, you do it,” Riha said.
“In the country, the average living donor kidney will last around 14 years,” Dean said. “And that number for a deceased donor, what we used to call cadaver kidneys is around nine and a half years.”
So in a case like Roethler’s, 42 years post-transplant is actually uncommon.
“If she’s not the longest kidney recipient survivor at Mayo, she is certainly one of the top three,” Dean said.
Dean says donation is an amazing gift and one of the best things a person can do.
There are currently 90,000 people registered on the UNOS kidney transplant waiting list.
Dean says in some parts of the country a person can be on the waiting list for 10 to 12 years, in our area the average wait time for a deceased donor kidney is four to six years.
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