Positivity: Transplant nurse donates own kidney to patient

From Atlanta, Georgia (HT Daily Good):

January 13, 2011

The way Clay Taber looks at it, he’s got three moms now.

There’s the woman who gave birth to him and raised him, of course. Then there’s his fiancée’s mother.

And then there’s the transplant nurse who, though practically a stranger, donated one of her healthy kidneys so that he might start married life untethered to a dialysis machine.

Allison Batson first heard about Taber, now 23, in August 2010, when a charge nurse at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital told her “it looks like we’ve got an admission from Columbus, Ga. It’s a 22-year-old in renal failure,” Batson recalled.. “It just tore me up.”

Due to a shortage of rooms elsewhere in the hospital, Taber was admitted to the seventh-floor transplant unit, which usually is reserved for patients who’ve already received new organs. Although Batson, 48, wasn’t assigned to care for Taber at first, she stuck her head in his room and said, “I hear there’s a good-looking young man in here.”

Taber had felt fine until right after his 22nd birthday on Aug. 6, 2010, when he started having night sweats. His dad figured it must be nerves, what with him newly graduated from Auburn University and shopping for an engagement ring.

In late August, though, Taber saw a doctor who ordered tests. His mom, Sandra Taber, was grocery shopping when the doctor’s office called to say her son was in complete kidney failure and needed to be hospitalized immediately.
Tests revealed he had Goodpasture syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that attacks the kidneys or the lungs. Symptoms can appear in a matter of days.

According to the National Library of Medicine, Goodpasture syndrome can be triggered by a viral respiratory infection or by inhaling hydrocarbon solvents. Taber wonders if swimming in the oil-slicked Gulf of Mexico a few weeks before he became ill might be the culprit in his case.

He spent the next month in the hospital, during which he underwent dialysis and plasmapheresis to try to remove the antibodies that had attacked his kidneys. As the weeks passed, Batson bonded with his mother. “I really could relate to his mom and the helplessness that she felt,” says Batson, the mother of four, ages 16 to 27, one of whom has a form of autoimmune arthritis. ”I really felt for her watching her baby go through this.”

Once Taber was strong enough, he was to be placed on the waiting list for a cadaver kidney. Currently, 90,000 U.S. patients are waiting for a donor kidney, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Taber says he was told he could expect to wait three to five years.

But Batson had another idea – to offer him one of hers. …

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