Kidney Patients Tell Their Success Stories : Transplants: Donors and recipients gathered at Western Medical Center to celebrate the hospital’s 3rd anniversary as a center for the renal operations.

At age 48, Ruth E. Quann of Tustin has enrolled as a freshman at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana. “I’m starting at the bottom and I hope I make it,” the woman said with a grin.

Quann attributes her surge of energy and aspirations to a kidney transplant that has severed her dependence on dialysis machines and renewed her health. “I have a new lease on life,” Quann said Saturday to a gathering of transplant recipients, candidates, donors and family members at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana.

Among the donors, Richard Haro, a 45-year-old homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, was hale and bragging about how he had run long-distance relays and marathons less than a year after he donated a kidney to his father.

Such success stories are quite common, according to transplant experts who spoke at a luncheon to celebrate the medical center’s third anniversary as a kidney transplant center. Two other hospitals in Orange County, St. Joseph Hospital and UCI Medical Center in Orange, also perform renal transplants.

“We know how to do the operation very well. . . . The problem we have in organ transplants across the United States and in Orange County is (a shortage of) organ donation,” said Dr. J. Harold Helderman, medical director of the transplant center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Helderman had been invited to Western Medical Center as a guest speaker.

Helderman said wherever he travels he plays the role of a missionary in encouraging more people to will their organs--from hearts to kidneys, livers and lungs--to be surgically implanted in others who need them.

He said about a fourth of all people on waiting lists for transplants will die before organs become available. Meanwhile, each year only about a sixth of the people whose organs are usable for transplants make those organs available upon their death.

Dr. Garo M. Tertzakian, director of Western Medical Center’s renal transplantation program, said about 1,000 people are waiting for cadaver kidneys in Southern California, including 125 in Orange County.

The usual wait for a cadaver kidney, he said, is one year to 18 months, during which time would-be recipients generally must receive dialysis treatments three times a week. (A dialysis machine cleanses the blood in patients with failed kidneys.)

“Unfortunately, due to a shortage of donors, every year the wait is longer,” Tertzakian said.

The prospect for all kinds of transplants has improved dramatically, Tertzakian said, with the introduction of the drug cyclosporin A, which reduces the body’s rejection of an organ graft. “Since the mid-1980s the graft survival rate has doubled,” he said.

Nationally the first-year survival rate for a kidney graft from a cadaver is 82%, increasing to up to 98% if the donor is a living relative with closely matching tissue. Half of the kidney grafts from cadavers function another nine years on the average, compared to an average of as many as 35 additional years for grafts from living relatives.

Videotaping Quann at Saturday’s celebration was her elder sister, Thomasine Matthews. Last December, Matthews donated one of her kidneys to her sister, who had been receiving dialysis treatments for two years while seeking a transplant.

“I’d do it again,” declared Matthews, although she said her lung had collapsed during the surgery, requiring her to be put on life support systems and frightening her children.

Matthews said that since she has seen the improvement in her sister’s health, she has decided to donate all her organs for transplants upon her death.

Quann, surrounded at the lunch table by family members, including her mother, sons, grandsons, nieces and nephews, said she feels so indebted that she also has decided to will all her body parts. “Now that I have my second chance I want to give something back equivalent to what I was given,” she said.