Denver – A Colorado woman who found a kidney donor on the Internet underwent transplant surgery at a Chicago hospital today, the ninth organ donation arranged by one Web site, a spokesman said.
The surgery was under way at midday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital but the outcome was not immediately known, said Robert Volosevich Jr., a spokesman for MatchingDonors.com.
Hospital spokeswoman Kelly Sullivan said it was the first time Northwestern had performed a transplant operation knowing it was arranged online. She declined to comment on today’s operation.
The recipient, 37-year-old Karen Traxler of Livermore, was suffering from congenital kidney failure and had been on the United Network for Organ Sharing waiting list for years, the Web site said.
The network is a nonprofit group with a government contract that allocates organs donated from the dead and has opposed the use of sites like MatchingDonors.com.
Volosevich said Traxler met her donor, Susan Buonsante of the Denver suburb of Aurora, after she read about Bob Hickey, believed to be the first person to receive an organ from a donor he found on the Internet.
Hickey, of Edwards, had a kidney transplant at Presbyterian/St.
Luke’s Medical Center in Denver in October after meeting his donor, Rob Smitty of Chattanooga, Tenn., on MatchingDonors.com.
Doctors delayed the surgery for a day to ensure Smitty was not profiting from the operation, a legal and ethical violation.
He later spent five days in jail for failing to pay child support.
