Doc: We have vital need for kidney donors
Nucci transplant today
As John Nucci undergoes kidney transplant surgery today, advocates and doctors say there is a vital need for more donors — a cause the former city councilor says he will champion when he recovers.
Nucci, 66, of East Boston, was due to go under the knife early this morning at Massachusetts General Hospital alongside family friend Kerri Abrams, 37, of Arlington, who is donating one of her kidneys to him.
Nucci’s own kidneys are operating at just 2 percent due to his genetic polycystic kidney disease. He said yesterday he was confident as he prepared to go into surgery at Massachusetts General.
“They know what they’re doing,” Nucci said.
Dr. Eliot Heher, the medical director of MGH’s kidney donor team, said the number of people waiting for a kidney skyrocketed between 1998 and 2015 as advances in transplant medicine made getting a new kidney the ideal option rather than one of last resort.
“Now there’s absolutely no doubt that transplantation is preferred” to alternatives such as dialysis, Heher said. “It’s what we all would want for ourselves.”
The supply of kidneys, though, has not followed, Heher said. He said it’s remained relatively level for a couple of decades, so a gap has yawned between the supply and need for kidneys even though the spike in people looking for kidneys has plateaued since 2015. Some of the 83,978 on the list nationally may have to wait a decade for the organ.
Today’s surgery — removing a kidney from Abrams and transplanting it into Nucci — is expected to take three to four hours.
Typically, the operation involves doctors making a long incision on the side of each patient, according to the Johns Hopkins University.
The doctors usually have the kidney switch sides; if it comes from her right side, it will end up in his left, and vice versa. They do that because a flipped kidney allows the doctors better access to connecting all the internal tubes, according to Johns Hopkins.
Nucci said he’s hoping to be discharged as early as Friday.
Nucci said he plans on advocating for a law revision to change how people register as organ donors. He wants to make it so you have to opt out of being an organ donor rather than choosing to be one.
Nucci said he believes many people who aren’t registered as being possible organ donors in the event of their deaths would be just fine with someone making good use of their body parts after they’re gone.
“I was one of them,” Nucci said. He just recently had the Registry of Motor Vehicles put the little red heart on his driver’s license.
Paul Dooley, the head Canton-based organization called MatchingDonors. com that pairs up living donors and recipients, said as many as two dozen a day contact the nonprofit looking to donate a kidney out of the kindness of their hearts.
“It’s amazing — good people come forward,” Dooley said, adding that their motivations are often personal. “Someone lost a grandparent, they want to save a grandparent. Someone lost a nephew, they want to save a kid.”