Kidney transplant recipient meets her lifesaving donor

Kaneohe resident Anne Hussey met for the first time Tuesday a Kauai man whose act of kindness will allow her to end four years of exhausting dialysis treatments.

Last week the 55-year-old wife and mother received a healthy kidney from Mike Bailey, a 60-year-old Lihue dentist who had no ties to Hussey.

Bailey decided to donate one of his kidneys to a complete stranger, an act he says came after much reflection and years of putting it off.

"I’m going to go home next week, and my life is going to be the same, no different. But hers won’t be the same," Bailey said. "For three years I talked myself out of it, thinking I was going to save it for a friend or relative. It’s not, ‘Why me? It’s, ‘Why not me?’ You’ve got to have a conversation with the man in the mirror."

The Queen’s Transplant Center performed Nov. 4 its first so-called altruistic kidney transplant — a form of donation whereby a living person gives a healthy organ to someone they do not know.

"This type of donation is very rare and a truly selfless act," Queen’s said in a news release. There are only between seven and 10 living donor transplants annually.

Most of the organs donated locally each year come from people involved in catastrophic accidents, according to the National Kidney Foundation of Hawaii. Those with chronic diseases such as cancer are ineligible to donate their organs.

"This man saved my life. But he did more than just give me a kidney," Hussey said, sitting alongside her husband, Colin, and 25-year-old daughter, Angelica Rockquemore.

"Not only did you give me the gift of life, but you restored hope back to me," Hussey told Bailey during their meeting at the Queen’s Medical Center, while giving him a hand-painted art piece with two flowers and a bud representing the both of them and the donated kidney. "I didn’t have hope when my life consisted of going to dialysis three times a week and that was it. I’d come home tired. I was so fatigued. There’s hope for tomorrow, hope for a future. May God bless you 100-fold."

There are approximately 410 Hawaii patients awaiting organ transplants, mostly for kidneys, Queen’s said. The biggest obstacle to shortening the list is the lack of organ donors, said Whitney Limm, Queen’s vice president of clinical integration. About 5 percent of people on the waiting list die every year, he said.

What’s more, Hawaii consistently has the longest waiting time compared with the national average due to the higher rate of renal failure and inadequate number of donors.

"People dive into a raging ocean or jump into a swollen river or run into a burning building to save people, but they won’t do this," Bailey said. "The problem is it’s a slow-burn fuse. It’s not urgent enough. Nobody’s dying today, so people kick (the can) down the road and forget about it. At some point you’ve got to pick up the can."

Bailey added that transplant operations are less of a risk than driving in Honolulu traffic.

"You jump into cars and risk your life to do it," Bailey said. "Here you can save somebody’s life and you don’t have to risk your life. I thought to myself, ‘If I go to my grave with this kidney sitting in me, I’ve wasted it.’ This is my week to … finally get it done."

For more information on organ donations, call the Queen’s Transplant Center at 691-8897.