Rep. Susie Swanson said the thought of donating a kidney once terrified her.
Swanson, a Republican legislator from Clay Center, had never been through surgery, and her tolerance for pain is not too high.
But when her neighbor’s son, whose twin brother had died of cancer, needed a new kidney to survive, Swanson felt compelled to act.
“He was very, very ill,” she says. “And they’d already lost one son.”
Swanson entered into a paired kidney exchange program with her neighbor’s son at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He eventually received a kidney from another donor, but Swanson stayed in the program and ended up donating one of hers to a woman from California.
She calls her donation, which occurred in October 2012, a “humbling, very positive experience.”
“It was amazing,” Swanson say. “Probably the most significant reaction I think was meeting her mother, because what got me into this was my compassion for my neighbor’s mother.”
Swanson and Rep. Erin Davis, a Republican from Olathe who donated stem cells, will present a resolution Wednesday on the House floor as part of Donate Life’s Blue and Green Day at the Statehouse. The day will include a donor registry drive inside the Capitol and a luncheon with legislators.
Davis said she and other members of her family joined the Be The Match registry when her nephew needed a bone marrow transplant. She didn't match with him, but years later she was contacted by the organization because she matched with a 15-year-old boy who had leukemia.
Davis agreed to donate stem cells to the boy. She said that the process was time-consuming but no more painful than donating blood.
"I think that's something people need to know," Davis said. "It was lifesaving and pretty easy to do."
The House resolution declares that April will be National Donate Life Month in Kansas. It notes that about 2,600 of the 124,000 Americans on the national transplant waiting list are from Kansas or Missouri.
Since the United Network for Organ Sharing began tracking organ donation in the United States in 1987, organ donors have added more than 2 million years to the lives of the organ recipients, according to a study published recently in the journal JAMA Surgery.
Kansans who wish to donate organs after death can elect to do so when they get or renew a driver’s license.
Becoming a living donor like Swanson or Davis takes a bit more paperwork and lab testing. Swanson says she did the initial phases of testing at her local medical center, but the final phase was at Johns Hopkins.
She was in the hospital for two days following the laparoscopic procedure to remove her kidney and altogether spent two weeks in Baltimore convalescing.
She says she notices no difference in living with one kidney instead of two, and all involved — she, the woman who received her kidney and her neighbor’s son — are in good health.
Swanson says she always has been drawn to helping others, which was why she pursued a career in social work. For those who are similarly moved but frightened of the pain of organ donation, she understands.
“I would tell them that there was nobody more cowardly than me,” Swanson says. “Actually I thought about donating two years prior, and I couldn’t because I was just paralyzed by fear.”
Once the time came, she said the pain was replaced by a calm that she attributes to the Holy Spirit, and she has no regrets.
“If I had an opportunity to do it again, I’d do it in a heartbeat,” Swanson says.
Andy Marso is a reporter for KHI News Service in Topeka, a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor team.
