Give life to others

By: Gabriela Ardila 10ºB

Performing a surgical procedure itself is a life-saving course of action whatever the outcome is. The main advantage of medicine lies in the possibility of an effective treatment for people who need help or simply improve the quality of their lives. Transplants of any kind can be very difficult procedures depending on their organ and damage development. And, although many of them are now made daily as no such big deal, there is specifically one that is commemorated the 27th of March: The Kidney Transplant. 

In brief, the first important step in the scientific development of transplantation took place at the beginning of the 20th century and was related to the discovery of the vascular suture by a French researcher, Alexis Carrel. Therefore, the origin of organ transplantation is closely linked to the development of vascular surgery, firstly realized from a kidney graft from a pig, implanted in the left elbow of a 50-year-old woman with end-stage renal failure. And although the procedure did not succeed, from that moment on doctors from different parts of Europe developed the “experimental surgery” and made it become a modern, innovative, and real lifesaver process. On December 24, 1952, the first kidney transplant between relatives took place at the Necker Hospital in Paris: A 16-year-old carpenter fell from a scaffold and suffered a rupture of his right kidney, which had to be removed. After the operation, he became anuric and it was discovered that the removed kidney was unique. Six days later, his mother's left kidney was transplanted. The kidney worked immediately, and the recipient's clinical and biological situation improved rapidly. However, 22 days after the transplant, the graft function failed due to an episode of rejection. A few days later, the recipient died: there was no possibility of dialysis and no known treatment for rejection at the moment, but also, with the slow pass of time, it became a secure way of transplanting the organ and ended bringing peace and love to families all over the world. 

Something unique about Kidney transplants comes from their reprehensible ability to link beautifully a family donor and the patient. Overwhelming situations come daily by this medical procedure, now that family is more involved than receiving an organ from a stranger. Knowing you can save your mom´s, dad´s, or brother's life is profuse, and although we may know a story or two, whether it is from someone outside of us or someone in our family, to commemorate March 27th I want to tell the story of a strong and faithful woman named Irene Navarro and her husband Jairo. 

Jairo was diagnosed with renal insufficiency, a disease with the horrible capacity of deriving more organs. His history was harsh as his seven possible donations were always brought aside by the misfortunes of life. Having organ compatibility is not easy. Factors such as “the medical revision and comparing between donor and patient”, the lack of donations from strangers for this specific organ, and the medical laws of each country; Costa Rica, his home, and Colombia, his second natal home, made-ups, and downs in the path of his human challenge. Nevertheless, all family members' strong ideals and conceptions of life made his last months on the face of the earth the most humble and charming hours a man can beg for. 

Blood type, gender, body measurements, and the donor's health plays the game when it comes to verifying if someone can receive a patient's different organ from what you have inside your body. In Irene´s case as well as Jairo´s brother, both kidneys had “an extra artery” that Jairo couldn't receive in his organism, his wife's stepmother had a tumor in her liver, which would not have been discovered unless she had not been screened to donate her kidney, his children were too small to submit them in a scenario like this one, and through a huge search between friends, he finally discovered that a really close friend of Irene could donate the precious organ to him. Three times were the ones in which life interrupted the lifesaver procedure; the first one was caused by slight flu she caught some days before the surgery, nothing dangerous or out of sight. The second one was thanks to heart damage he developed through one of his “crises”. Remember I told you this disease expanded to other organs? Well, in Jairo´s case he got breaking cardiac damage in-between time, and in an attempt to compensate the body for the damage he had suffered, medical staff gave him a strong amount of dialysis shocks to lose weight and reduce the physical strain on his heart. The third one was thanks to COVID-19. By March, the beginning of the pandemic, he still did not have his desperate needed kidney, and when doctors approved again his surgery with her wife´s friend, she could not do more than declining walking up to the doors of a hospital and risking her life by being contaminated with the strange virus of then. She has two children, the thought of leaving them alone in this messed up world scared her to death. 

As Costa Rica did not give him any opportunity of saving his life, before his third attempt of taking this repeated friend´s kidney, he came to Colombia for almost one year to see if a stranger could donate. Unfortunately, no one crossed his path and he did not receive anything. If Costa Rica had only three kidneys for 400 people on their waiting list for a whole year, Colombia had no more than 10 more kidneys on its list. It was like finding "a needle in a haystack". Colombia's medical rules dictated that only first-line members could donate organs to patients, no possibilities of friends as in Costa Rica, and, in extraordinary cases, if a cadaveric donor arrived, the anonymous patient had to die "almost perfectly". It had to be in the hospital because if it was not, the kidney would die by not being irrigated, it could not have any history of the disease, and the cause of death would be neurological. The time he passed in our country was not the best nor the worst, but no luck ran with him. 

Although it was a long and exhausting process, the cheerful couple did not completely stop their lives. They had two kids, a girl, and a boy, and to sustain their lives and the difficulties of caring for the illness, both of them never stopped working. Jairo was an industrial engineer, and he worked building apartments. His bosses knew what he was facing, and with all the kindness in their souls, they were especially flexible with their schedule. Even if it was difficult for Irene to catch up with her traveling jobs and constant trips to the hospitals from hours apart from their village, she managed to tear it all up when their boat was drowning. Now, something special that it is not capable of leaving aside, is the one special Sunday morning in which some friends invited them to amass. In that commonplace was an angelical priest. Knowing the situation Jairus was in, he sat him down next to him and talked to him for a long time. His words were so comforting that Jairo expressed to his wife the change that this priest had given to his soul. From that moment on, some of the repercussions of his kidney problem were healed, and with that miraculous act that God had given them, they confirmed the hope that they had given to the Holy Power during all that wave of misery. 

Life turns us upside down in the most remarkable ways. At the end of the road, they both knew he was exhausted off all the rave he passed through, but a moral teach I think not only them but anyone who reads and knows their story, as I am plenty sure that the type of challenge God made them and million families pass trough with kidney transplantations, are to leave us in the soul that the importance of it is the process of knowing how to give life to others; however, they internalize it.

Source: https://www.trasplantes.net/index.php/men-sobre-los-trasplantes/historia-de-los-trasplantes