When Theresa Darroch did a series of lessons about the importance of organ donations with her grade 4 class, she was speaking with first hand experience.
The Elora woman returned to her teaching job at F.A. Hamilton Public School in Guelph in January after donating a kidney to a nephew on her husband Michael’s side of the family.
Theresa Darroch explained in an interview that Christopher Lichti, of Milverton, was 25 years old. In June of 2007, he got double pneumonia.
Darroch said of Lichti, “He was never healthy. Nobody knew the underlying cause. Then, somebody did the test.”
Doctors discovered that Lichti’s kidney was functioning at only five per cent of what it should be.
She said she and Lichti both had blood type O-negative. They met at a family wedding and “he asked me if I would give him a kidney. I said I would.”
After that, Darroch was tested at London Health Sciences, where she said the treatment was superb, and her doctor, Patrick Luke (surgeon, London Health Sciences Centre and associate professor of surgery, University of Western Ontario), had recently been named by the Globe and Mail as one of the rising stars in Canada under age 40.
Darroch was indeed a good match, and she went into the hospital to donate the kidney on Nov. 22, and was out three days later. She convalesced until the start of January, and returned to school the same time that her students did.
It was there she decided to share her story with her students, and she said she had the full support of the school board in doing so.
“It was a great experience for the kids – learning the experience of organ donations. “It was a fabulous experience for me to be able to involve them.”
The first successful living donor transplant was performed between 23-year-old identical twins in 1954. Doctor Joseph E. Murray and associates at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now Brigham and Women’s Hospital) in Boston, transplanted a healthy kidney from Ronald Herrick into Richard, who had chronic kidney failure.
Richard went on to live an active, normal life, dying eight years later from causes unrelated to the transplant. Still alive over 50 years since the transplant, Ronald is a retired math teacher from Maine.
The kidney is the most frequent type of living organ donation. For the donor, there is little risk in living with one kidney because the remaining kidney compensates to do the work of both kidneys.
Darroch learned a number of facts dealing with kidney donations:
– living donation is best for kidneys, and one from a living donor can last 20 years, while one from a deceased person lasts about half that;
– donors must be compatible only by blood type; and
– there are 1,200 people in Ontario waiting for kidneys; and in 2004 in Ontario, 122 people died while waiting for a kidney.
Darroch said Lichti is doing just fine since the operation.
As for her, Darroch had little or no trouble with the surgery, which, she said, was easy.
“It’s pretty cool when you don’t have any stitches,” she said of modern medical techniques. “After one month, you wouldn’t even know you had this procedure done.”
