A match made in heaven: From a HAFTR blood drive to kidney donor

Posted

Eighteen-year-old Kevin O’Brien goes to school, enjoys hanging out with his friends, playing video games and taking things apart to see how they work and then reassembling them. Tall and lanky as a teen, he was so striking as a young child that he was a baby model for the Ford agency. Outgoing and quite intelligent, Kevin seems like a typical teen — one who hopes for a future in the medical field. In fact, he wants to develop a way to clone a kidney — “a bio-identical kidney,” in which everything is the same, explaining “it has to be science fiction before it becomes science fact.”

Kevin, however, is far from the average teen. After a routine finger prick blood test at his pediatrician’s office at age three, his parents learned that Kevin suffered from renal dysfunction and was not going to live the life of a normal child.

Kevin does not have any specific disease. “There is no bacterial infection” that causes his kidneys to not perform as expected,” he explains. “Technically,” he continues, “I have no disease.” Instead, due to an obstruction in both urethras, urine is not able to flow out of his body but instead backs up into the kidneys. By the age of five, he had already undergone two surgeries to correct the biological defects and was told he would need a kidney transplant by the time he reached adolescence. In July 2005, he received a kidney from his father.

The transplant was successful and routine blood work and doctor visits indicated that Kevin was doing well. But 18 months later, he developed the BK virus, which is present in the general population but only becomes apparent when a foreign kidney enters the body. It was like getting “kicked in the teeth,” he said, after the virus fought and killed the kidney, resulting in complete failure of the organ. By July 2008, Kevin was in need of another transplant.

Page 1 / 4