A Colorado woman who found a kidney donor on the Internet underwent successful transplant surgery Friday at a Chicago hospital, a spokesman for MatchingDonors.com said.
Northwestern Memorial Hospital spokeswoman Kelly Sullivan said it was the first time Northwestern had performed a transplant operation knowing it had been arranged online. She declined to comment further on Friday’s operation.
The recipient, 37-year-old Karen Traxler of Livermore, northwest of Fort Collins, was suffering from congenital kidney failure and had been on the United Network for Organ Sharing waiting list for years, the website said.
The network is a nonprofit group with a government contract that allocates organs donated from the dead. It has opposed the use of sites such as MatchingDonors.com.
Robert Volosevich Jr., a spokesman for MatchingDonors.com, said it was the ninth organ donation arranged by the website. He said Traxler met her donor, Susan Buonsante of Aurora, after reading about Bob Hickey, believed to be the first person to receive an organ from a donor who was found on the Internet.
Hickey, of Edwards, had a kidney transplant at a Denver hospital last fall after meeting his donor, Rob Smitty of Chattanooga, Tenn., via MatchingDonors.com. Doctors delayed the surgery for a day to ensure Smitty was not profiting from the operation, which would be a legal and ethical violation.
Smitty later spent five days in jail for failing to pay child support.
