Twelve patients at a California hospital are undergoing a mass kidney-transplant that's never before been done at a West Coast hospital, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The mass kidney swap, with six donors and six recipients ranging from age 26 to 70, was split into a series of operations performed Thursday and Friday by surgeons at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.
The first three procedures already went smoothly on Thursday, including one for Sacramento County resident Zully Broussard, who did not expect to set off a domino effect when she volunteered to donate her kidney to save a man's life.
"I thought I was going to help this one person who I don't know, but the fact that so many people can have a life extension, that's pretty big," Broussard, 55, told KGO.
Broussard's kidney went to a man whose relative was also willing to donate hers, but when doctors learned she wasn't a match, she opted to donate her kidney to someone else.
That person also has an incompatible relative who agreed to donate to someone else, continuing the chain of donors and recipients.
"In this grouping that we have, we found compatible donors for each of the recipients by trading kidneys around," Dr. William Bry, a surgeon at California Pacific Medical Center, told KGO.
A team of 60 surgeons, anesthesiologists, physician assistants and nurses are involved in the transplants, which were done back-to-back to reduce the risk of medical complications and reduce the risk of someone getting cold feet, the Chronicle reported.
Over 100,000 Americans are waiting for kidney transplants. Thanks to new computer technology, doctors were able to match all six recipients with donors in a matter of weeks as opposed to months- which is how long it took for matches to be found when the same hospital did a five-way kidney transplant four years ago, doctors told KGO.
Broussard, currently recovering, did not think twice about doing something to save someone else's loved one. She lost her son and husband to cancer.
"I know what if feels like to want an extra day," Broussard told the Chronicle.
