By Megan McCloskey
The Associated Press
An Internet-arranged kidney transplant from an Ohio donor to a Colorado recipient was successful, officials said Wednesday.
Dr. Angie Carranza, 37, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist, received a kidney from Ohio teacher Sandy Miller.
The transplanted kidney was functioning and both women were recovering, Porter Adventist Hospital officials said.
“On a scale of one to 10, she said the pain was a seven,” Carrie Miller, the donor’s daughter, said shortly after the surgery was completed. “But she said it wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be, and she’s glad she did it.”
Both women will be in the hospital for at least the next four days, hospital officials said.
Carranza had the surgery after one doctor refused to perform it, citing ethical concerns over the way it was arranged.
Carranza located Miller, 47, of Bowling Green on MatchingDonors.com. The Canton, Mass.-based site has triggered a debate over the ethics of such arrangements.
It was the second transplant in Denver arranged by MatchingDonors.com and the 16th nationally.
Ben Vernon, the surgeon who performed Carranza’s operation, said that with the average time someone spends waiting for a kidney – around 30 months in Colorado – using living donors is a good alternative to get people healthy faster, even with an Internet-brokered arrangement.
“The only way I know of to beat that statistic is to have a living donor,” he said at a news conference after the surgeries.
Patients who have spent less time on dialysis do better after a transplant, Vernon added.
Hank Fanelli, administrative director for the transplant department at Porter, said the hospital’s ethics committee ruminated over questions involving justice and fairness in the Internet-brokered donor system. In the end, the hospital decided there was no injustice to anybody by this type of transplant arrangement, he said.
“We’re enabling and encouraging live donation,” Fanelli said.
“It takes somebody off the waiting list.”
The traditional donation system revolves around organ donations from family members or from the deceased. But a shortage of cadaver donors leaves many stranded on the waiting list for years, Fanelli said.
“The system itself has to realize there are other alternatives,” he said.
The number of live donations has increased over the past decade, but people tend to prefer to donate to someone they know or, as in the case of the website, to someone whose story touches them, said Phil Gauchier, a doctor who specializes in kidney dialysis and transplants.
“I don’t think I would be helping anybody by denying them the chance to do that,” he said.
Both Carranza and Miller turned to not-for-profit MatchingDonors.com because of publicity surrounding its first transplant nearly a year ago at Denver’s Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center.
The hospital first halted the kidney transplant surgery when officials realized it was arranged through a commercial website, but then allowed it to proceed, promising to study the issue further.
