Toby Tyler (left) donated a kidney to friend Keith Murray in July. (Photo courtesy Keith Murray)
Toby Tyler is a kidney donor.
It was just a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, a simple “yes” to a request from a friend. “I never thought about doing it before in my life,” Tyler says.
His kidney went to Keith Murray, a friend and youth pastor at his church, Destiny Church in Chester. Murray’s wife had asked church members to be tested to see if they would be a match for her husband, whose kidneys were in failure from Alport syndrome, a rare genetic condition.
Tyler matched. “We feel it is an answered prayer for him,” he says.
The procedure was done on July 17 at the Hume-Lee Transplant Center at Virginia Commonwealth University, which marks its 60th anniversary this month.
Murray was lucky. As of Oct. 26, there were 96,459 Americans in need of a viable kidney for transplant, according to Richmond-based UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing, the national coordinator for organ donations. There are 2,442 people on the waiting list for a kidney in Virginia. It can take five years on the waiting list to receive a kidney from a deceased donor.
Live donors like Tyler who are willing to donate an organ are another option, but it’s a lesser-known program. Finding a live donor to match makes a transplant easier. Tissue type is more important than blood matches when it comes to kidney donations, says Kate Mardigian, transplant outreach coordinator for Hume-Lee, and the kidneys from a live donor tend to function better and longer. Even better, when you find an appropriate match, you jump to the head of the list; there’s no waiting.
Transplant surgery was a new field when transplant center namesake David Hume was at work at the old Medical College of Virginia. He and his team had their labs in the basement of what is now called West Hospital, the art deco behemoth that opened in 1940. They performed the first kidney transplant in Virginia at the Medical College in 1957. Hume and his collaborator and later successor, center co-namesake H.M. Lee, are also founders of the network that led to UNOS.
“What they were doing was transforming medicine,” Mardigian says.
Today, Hume-Lee performs about 150 kidney transplants each year, mostly involving living donors. It’s a robotic procedure now, and recovery time and the overall ordeal have been greatly reduced, especially for the donor, says Marlon Levy, chair of transplant surgery at VCU and director of the transplant center. Before the less-invasive robotic surgery, it took a major incision to gain access to the kidney, and sometimes a rib had to be pushed out of the way.
“We were asking a lot of the living donor,” he says.
Laparoscopic procedures, which were adopted in the late 1990s, remain the standard, but robotics, which were adopted at VCU in 2016, are the next wave, according to Levy.
Murray received his kidney from Tyler on a Monday. By Wednesday, Tyler was back home, and he was back to work (from home) that Thursday.
Within three weeks, he says, he was almost back to his old self, just a bit off in terms of endurance for his workout regimen.
Recovery took a bit longer for Murray. He was back at work about two months after the procedure. Murray say he’s grateful for the gift. “To have a living donor is overwhelming,” he says. “You don’t know how to say you’re thankful, but you are.”
Tyler said the experience was a lesson in the great need for organ donations, and in learning how surprisingly easy it is to sign up. “Not enough people are aware that you can literally walk in the door and donate an organ,” he says.
