The first successful human kidney transplant – and, by most accounts, the first successful human organ transplant – took place Dec. 23, 1954, in Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now known as Brigham and Women’s) in Boston.
Richard Herrick, 23, was dying of kidney failure; there was no known cure and dialysis was in its infancy, and unlikely to buy much time at all. His family, including Richard’s identical twin, Ronald, was in despair. I don’t have any proof that Ronald Herrick said, “Gee, Doc, I’d give him one of my own kidneys if it would help,” but it seems like something that an earnest young man in the 1950s would have said. And while I don’t know how Ronald phrased it, he did offer one of his own kidneys to Richard.
It was pretty much a medical Hail Mary. Human-to-human organ transplants had never worked before; had the twins not been identical, it would never have worked. Immunosuppressive medications to prevent organ rejection wouldn’t be invented until the 1970s. CT scans weren’t invented until 1971. They were running this operation off pure anatomical knowledge and X-rays. The doctors did not know if it would work. They weren’t sure what the effects on Ronald, the healthy donor, would be. (A surprising amount of medical innovation starts with “Hey, what if … ?”) The night before the surgery, Richard sent a note to Ronald in the hospital that read, “Get out of here and go home.” Ronald sent a note back replying, “I am here, and I am going to stay.”
The operation was a success. Richard married a nurse he met in the recovery room, had two children and lived eight more years with his brother’s kidney inside him, which was pretty impressive considering the general state of medical care at the time. The doctors who performed the surgery won a Nobel Prize. In the decades since, thousands of lives have been improved, extended, saved and otherwise blessed, none of which would have been possible without Ronald’s act of courage. And it must have taken a lot of courage.
When I started the process of becoming a living kidney donor, the Maine Transplant Program was able to explain the possible risks in detail, with lots of reassuring statistics to back them up. Ronald didn’t have that. The best he had were some actuarial tables from insurance companies that the doctors had found that showed it was possible to live just fine with one kidney.
So, what does a guy do after making medical history? Move to Maine, of course! Ronald Herrick, the world’s first living kidney donor, moved to Mount Vernon in 1968, where he taught math in Winthrop and at the University of Maine at Augusta. He raised cows and later moved to Belgrade. A true Mainer, he was extremely modest about his role in history and didn’t seem to like talking about it much. I was able to find only one interview with him online (it was on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” in 2004). As his wife, Cynthia, said, “I had to dig out of him about the transplant to get some details … he was not one to talk about himself.” (We all know at least one guy like this.) Ronald passed away in 2010, at 79, from non-kidney-related causes.
I learned about all this yesterday while I sat in a small room in the basement of Maine Medical Center, taking a glomerular filtration rate test to see how effectively my kidneys function, as part of my ongoing quest to become a living kidney donor myself. It took about 5½ hours. I got injected with radioactive isotopes, then waited an hour, and got my blood drawn and peed in a cup. Then I waited another hour, and then got my blood drawn and peed in a cup. This cycle repeated for about five hours. I drank the radiology department out of their entire supply of miniature Dasani bottles. (I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Katelyn, the medical technician who performed this test and listened to my many, many complaints about the radiology department’s automatic flushing toilet.).
The good news is, I passed the test. Or, as the nurse phrased it, I “have adequate kidney function to move forward.” The program’s cutoff rate is 85 liters per minute, and my kidney filters at 100.9 milliliters per minute. The next step is more lab work. Getting approved to be a kidney donor takes a lot longer than it did in 1954. Mostly because most of the tests I’ve taken hadn’t been invented yet.
Heather, the coordinator at the transplant program who responds to all my emails about which tests I can and cannot have coffee before taking, also told me that there has been a notable uptick in living donor applicants this week. Now, correlation does not necessarily equal causation; I can’t prove that this was the result of extremely generous Portland Press Herald readers taking it upon themselves to see if they can help save my friend Ted’s life, or the life of another individual. But I can’t disprove it, either.
So if anyone reading this did, in fact, fill out the Maine Transplant Program’s online survey, I would like to say: Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my kidney.
Victoria Hugo-Vidal is a Maine millennial. She can be contacted at:
themainemillennial@gmail.com
Twitter: @mainemillennial
Send questions/comments to the editors.
