Blood, organ donor with very big heart
Sunnyvale man has given 130 pints of blood, half a liver, more
“What I’m doing is keeping someone from passing before his time. It doesn’t matter who it is.”
Eric Steger, who may be the most prolific donor in the Bay Area
Eric Steger is running out of body parts to donate.
He’s already donated some of his bone marrow and half his liver. He’s donated blood and blood plasma more than 130 times — exactly how many he’s lost count.
Not long ago he flew halfway around the world to give away a kidney to a stranger in Tel Aviv. At the last minute, the transplant surgeons said the kidney donation wouldn’t work and Steger got to keep his kidney inside his body, which is where most people besides Steger choose to keep their internal organs.
“What I’m doing is a mitzvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for the kind of noble act that people are supposed to do but usually don’t. “If I can keep someone alive, that’s worth doing.”
Steger, a 50yearold college math tutor from Sunnyvale who may be the most prolific donor in the Bay Area, is resting up these days from the liver donation, his latest. Earlier this month, he flew to Pittsburgh and lay on an operating table for six hours while surgeons extracted much of that organ and stuck it inside the body of a very grateful 53yearold man in the next operating room.
While he recuperates from that, Steger is taking a few weeks off from work and going on long walks around Sunnyvale with his half a liver. The organ is expected to regrow slowly to its normal size if Steger behaves sensibly, follows his doctor’s orders and lays off the intoxicating fluids that are the traditional foe of the human liver.
So this week, he strolled 7 miles to a bowling alley and had a ginger ale.
Steger, who plays tournament chess when he’s not hanging around hospitals,
got into the donating habit three decades ago, after a high school science teacher offered extra credit to any student who gave a pint of blood.
Extra credit from a teacher, or other personal benefit, isn’t the right reason to be a donor, Steger soon concluded. After that, he never accepted anything for donations. Steger is playing for bigger stakes.
“I don’t like funerals, even funerals of people I don’t know,” he said. “What I’m doing is keeping someone from passing before his time. It doesn’t matter who it is.”
He did receive a plane ride to Pittsburgh to make the liver donation, but it was a middle seat in coach.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” said Steger, a slender man with a wide smile and a sense of humor that comes in handy in places like hospitals.
Steger became friends with the stranger who got his liver, a Des Moines rabbi named Jeffrey KurtzLendner. They met in the hospital a couple of days after the partial liver changed hands. Doctors said KurtzLendner had been days away from death.
“He’s given me my life,” KurtzLendner said in a video recorded by the rabbi’s wife in his hospital room, with Steger by his side, “and he’s given my kids their smiles back.”
As for his bone marrow, donated in 2007, Steger doesn’t know who ended up with that. Steger wrote a note to the bone marrow docs, and they agreed to pass it along to the recipient, who replied three years after the procedure with a halfpage “Dear Sir” letter addressed to Steger.
“Thanks to you, I got back to a normal life,” the anonymous letter said. “I want you to know I feel well.”
That’s good enough for Steger. He keeps the note in his desk drawer and looks at it from time to time while he considers what part of him to part with next.
He’d still like to give someone a kidney, since he has two of them, but that won’t be allowed under the rules until Steger is able to wean himself from one of his hypertension medicines.
He wouldn’t mind giving one of his lungs, but that’s even harder to do because lungs are finicky about whom they go to. Steger said his brother in San Carlos would be the most likely person to get one of his lungs should his brother ever need one which, fortunately for him, he doesn’t.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 40,000 organ transplants were performed last year, with about 80% coming from cadavers. Some 113,000 patients are on waiting lists, hoping to get one. Kidneys are the most requested organ, by about 9 to 1.
Serial donors like Steger are “quite rare,” said Anne Paschke, a spokeswoman for the
Organ Procurement and Transplant Network, which coordinates organ donations. A healthy donor can give more than one organ, she said, although it takes an “extraordinarily selfless” person to do it.
As for the rest of his body, Steger awaits the day of reckoning that comes for all, donors and nondonors alike. Taking no chances, he carries in his wallet both a pink “donor” dot on his driver’s license and a separate green body donation authorization card. With any luck, whoever rummages through his pockets will notice one or the other. At that point, heart, pancreas, liver, kidneys, skin, corneas and anything else will be up for grabs.
“I won’t be needing them,” Steger said.
Meanwhile, as part of his recuperation, Steger walked over to the personnel office at Foothill College and found out that reimbursement for his time off work for the liver donation would come out of his personal sick time. That means his liver isn’t all he donated.
“That’s all right,” Steger said. “I’ve always had an altruistic streak.”