Measuring the Pulse of MCV Campus

Transforming Lives Through Transplants

On a chilly November morning, a 70-year-old woman is wheeled into an operation room and set up in the sterile room full of scalpels located on the fifth floor of the east wing in the Main hospital at the VCU Medical Center and Hospital.

Aside from being overweight, the woman appeared otherwise healthy.

Yet, here she was at 7:30 a.m. preparing to undergo a kidney transplant, one of the 18,695 patients who have received an organ transplant this year.

"We don’t choose who get’s a transplant. Everyone is on a national waiting list," Maureen Bell, the hospital’s kidney transplant coordinator, explains.

The United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, produces a list for every organ received, which includes a list of patients considered eligible for the surgery. Age, race and gender are not factors that affect one’s eligibility.

In January 2007 the Hume-Lee Transplant center at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Medical Center had 94,500 patients waiting for organs. Of that number, 69,000 needed a kidney. Of those waiting, 24,000 transplants were completed between the months of January and October.

Getting the kidney, however, isn’t always easy. For example, in the 70-year-old woman’s case, she undergoes anesthesia and is prepped for surgery. However, the anesthesiologists learn that the kidney had yet to be approved.

Kidneys can live without a body on a pump or in a bucket of ice for up to 24 to 48 hours. The kidney en route to the VCU’s medical center had been on a pump for a considerable amount of time. Sometimes, if an organ has been disengaged too long, surgeons may deem them as unusable.

That is what could have happened in the 70-year-old woman’s case.

The O.R. was in a panic with the news and those who had been setting up were upset, wondering how to wake up a woman and tell her she did not receive the organ she needed to live. That she had been living in the pre-surgery unit, or P.S.U., to just be returned to home and back onto a waiting list.

Would the amount of time she would spend waiting for a donor be longer than her expected lifespan without one?

Bell believes that the chance of not proceeding with surgery would have been next to none.

"I can’t think of a case where the organ arrives and it can’t be used," Bell states. "We already have a lot of information on the kidney before it arrives. However the surgeons still like to look at it."

Approximately 30 minutes after the tension erupted, it was subsided with the news that the surgeons had checked the kidney that had just arrived and it was good to go.

The following articles - written by VCU Journalism Students - examine the medical school's legacy, student life, programs, buildings and future. All students are from Professor Bonnie Newman Davis' MASC 303 Newswriting Course. Loren Pritchett assisted in editing the articles.