Arvada woman gets kidney through sharing program

By Tracee M. Herbaugh, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 29, 2008 at 7:38 p.m.
Updated July 29, 2008 at 7:38 p.m.

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Brian Lehmann © The Rocky

Maggie Mrva, right, of Arvada is receiving a kidney from Martha Hansen, left, of Albuquerque.

They live in four different states and met only recently. Yet they are bound by a common experience.

On Wednesday, three of them will donate kidneys and three will receive them.

The six people, including an Arvada woman, were brought together by the Alliance for Paired Donations, which creates arrangements to match kidney patients with compatible donors.

It will be the first time the University of Colorado Hospital has participated in the alliance matching program. On Tuesday, patient Maggie Mrva, 56, met donor Martha Hansen, who traveled to Denver from New Mexico for the surgery.

Put simply, the program works this way: A pair made up of a donor and a kidney patient sign up with the alliance because a successful transplant is unlikely. A donor must be willing to give up a kidney to any compatible recipient. That, in turn, gives the partner a chance for an organ from another donor.

Hansen, 48, wanted to donate a kidney to a friend. "But we weren't compatible blood types and we lived so far away it just didn't seem practical," Hansen said. "We decided to look into this; I thought that I could help her that way."

Boleslav Mrva, Maggie's husband and donor partner, is giving a kidney to a patient in Alabama. The patient has a donor partner who is giving a kidney to Hansen's friend.

The three donors will all go under general anesthesia at the same time to avoid any last minute change of plan.

"If one of these pairs was not able to go to surgery, no one goes," said Vonnie Bagwell, the transplant coordinator at CU hospital. "It's really important that all those puzzle pieces come into place."

If a live organ match cannot be found, the alternative is a waiting-list for kidneys harvested from deceased donors. But such organs usually last only half as long as kidneys from live donors.

Maggie Mrva admitted she is "very, very nervous" and wishes her husband could be with her.

"For me it was very hard because he would have surgery somewhere else and if we aren't together it's going to be very very hard," she said. "My husband, he said no, we'll be separated for just one week, but we will be together many, many years after."

HOW IT WORKS

The University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora and hospitals in two other states on Wednesday will conduct simultaneous kidney transplants involving three donors and three recipients. They had registered with the Alliance for Paired Donations, which matches pairs of kidney donors and recipients.

Here's how the three pairs were brought together:

1. Martha Hansen, a New Mexico resident, wanted to donate a kidney to her long-time friend, Robin Graves of North Carolina, who has been on dialysis for four years. However, tests showed the two were incompatible matches.

2. So, Hansen was matched with Arvada resident Maggie Mrva, who suffers from polycystic kidney disease, an illness where the organ is taken over by cysts.

3. Mrva is able to participate in the program because her husband was matched with an unidentified patient in Alabama. He went there on Tuesday to donate his kidney.

4. The Alabama recipient participated with an unidentified donor who will give a kidney to Robin Graves.

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