Organ Donor Gets Chance to Walk Her Talk

The arrow sliced across the backyard, unimpeded, from 10-year-old Patty’s bow to her kid brother’s head.

And then, chaos.

Six-year-old Vincent Campbell stumbled into his mother’s arms, an arrow stuck behind his ear. Patty, stricken with fear, fled and hid. Their infuriated dad chased the neighbor who owned the bow and arrow.

As it turned out, Vinny wasn’t seriously hurt. They found Patty four hours later, cowering in the garbage bin under the house.

The day Patty used Vinny for target practice would become family legend. In fact, it was an accident--he had darted in front of her. She never wanted to hurt him.

“Vinny was always my baby brother,” she says. “I kind of always looked out for him.”

Thirty-three years later, Patty --now Patricia McDonough--was still looking out for her brother. Vinny’s health was failing; he needed a kidney, and Patty had one to give.

A Time Bomb Ticks for 30 Years

But Patty had something else too: an intimate understanding of the world of organ transplants. She is a nurse, and for the last six years her mission has been to ensure that people who need organs get them.

Now, suddenly, Patty was a donor, not a nurse. After all those years of counseling patients, how would it feel to be one? Would it happen the way she had always told the donors? Or would she be surprised?

All of these questions were secondary, of course. Her major concern was helping her brother cheat death again.

When Vinny was born, a nurse picked him up, her hand behind his head to support his neck. And that is why, 39 years later, he would need a kidney transplant.

The nurse had a boil on one of her fingers. Staph.

The infection traveled through Vinny’s left ear, and he remained in the hospital for a year. Doctors removed part of his mastoid bone; they bombarded him with antibiotics. Finally they sent him home.

“My mother said the doctors told her she was bringing him home from the hospital to die, that he wouldn’t survive his second year, that he would be dwarfed and retarded,” Patty says. “I tell him the retarded part was accurate.”

The Campbells were a close-knit and devoutly Catholic family; the kids, three boys and two girls, watched out for one another. Vinny was a sickly child. But his health problems ebbed when he was 5, and soon he was playing football and hockey in the streets of Flushing, Queens.

What no one realized was the effect of all those antibiotics. Vinny was allergic to penicillin, so other, experimental drugs were used. The result: two damaged kidneys, ticking like time bombs.

Vinny grew up, graduated from St. John’s University, went to work at the New York City Transit Authority as a computer specialist, got married--all without a clue that he was in failing health.

Patty, too, went to St. John’s, but only for a while. “I wanted to take off a year, and while I was working at Waldbaum’s [supermarket], I decided I better go back to school.”

Without too much thought, she decided to become a nurse.

For years, she worked in coronary intensive care. Then, six years ago, she shifted direction and went into transplant medicine.

First she went to work as a procurement coordinator. Hearing of a potential donor--someone who was brain-dead and might offer several organs--she would rush to the hospital, help supervise their care and counsel their families.

“You’re asking families to put aside their own pain and help somebody else. . . . It’s really a privilege to work with these families,” she says.

Then she would consult a list of those awaiting transplants and call their doctors: “I have a 42-year-old man who has a cranial hemorrhage. This is a heart offer.” Finally she would arrange travel.

“It’s absolutely fascinating work,” she says. But it is often frustrating as well.

Sixty thousand people need transplants in this country, 6,000 in New York alone; they wait, and wait, and sometimes die before acceptable donors--donors who have living wills or whose families are willing to allow organs to be removed--can be found.

“It is unconscionable that in a country like this, there should be so many invaluable organs going to waste,” says Dr. Vivian A. Tellis, head of the kidney transplant program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

Late last year, McDonough went to work at Montefiore as kidney transplant coordinator, interviewing recipients and matching them with donors. “It’s more than a job for her. It’s a calling,” Tellis said.

She also was responsible for managing Montefiore’s list of 975 patients awaiting kidney transplants--keeping in touch, making sure their condition was stable.

She was well aware of the condition of one patient on the list: Vincent Campbell.

When Vinny was 30, routine medical tests gave him the surprise of his life: His kidneys were beginning to fail. Doctors told him that with a low-protein diet, he might slow the deterioration.

It worked for five years, and then creatinine levels in his blood --markers of renal failure--began to rise again.

Vinny and his wife, Trina, resolved not to tell their sons, Kevin, 5, and Brian, 8, that their father was sick. Trina’s father had just died of complications of diabetes and had gone through a hellish experience with dialysis; there was no need to frighten the boys.

“I just had enough steam to go to work and come home and crash,” says Vinny, a jocular man who resembles the actor Nathan Lane.

“Don’t worry, I’ll find you a kidney,” his sister, the transplant expert, told him.

Last April, Vinny’s brothers and sisters and his wife decided to go en masse for testing to see if any of them might donate a kidney.

The results were good. His sister Judy and brother Christopher were perfect matches; Pat matched half of the six antigen markers, and Robert and Trina also matched, although not as well.

Judy was excluded because she suffers from multiple sclerosis. So plans were set: Christopher would donate his kidney in December.

But three days before the operation, doctors found that Christopher had three arteries connected to his kidneys, an abnormality that ruled him out as a donor.

Pat was next in line.

All along, “There was this little voice inside me that said, ‘I know it’s going to be me,’ ” she recalls. And now it was.

Despite her commitment to transplants, she had an instant of doubt. “I kind of had myself a good cry over it,” she says, “and after that, I had this peacefulness, this certainty that everything was going to be fine.”

Her husband, Terence, a telecommunications executive, was supportive, as were her three teenagers, Sean, Terence and Kathleen: “When a teenager thinks that you’ve done something cool, it’s a very good thing.”

Her patients “just thought it was the greatest thing. They said, ‘Maybe we’ll be roommates.’ ”

Her colleagues did for her what she had done for so many other would-be donors. “They really did their damnedest to make sure that I was doing this for the right reason, not just because I was a transplant professional and it was expected of me.”

‘If I Could Do It, They Should Do It’

The surgery was scheduled for Jan. 13; Vin and Pat were admitted the night before.

“We laughed a lot, my brother and I. We don’t take anything too seriously. I told him [that with a female kidney], every 28 days he’d probably get a little irritable. He might have to buy some Midol.”

Then she tears up. “There’s no way to thank anybody for a body part. So he just told me that he loved me. And I told him that I loved him.”

They were fully armed for surgery. They were both doused with holy water from Lourdes. They had rosary beads, and a fragment of St. Anthony’s bone, and Vinny had a friend’s scapular.

Tellis performed the operation; it was, he says, uneventful. Vinny felt better almost immediately. He looks forward to coaching his sons’ soccer and baseball teams, to “getting back my life.”

His sister intends to use her experience as a transplant-recruiting tool. “I’ll show them my scar, if that’s what it takes. . . . They shouldn’t say no. If I could do it, they should do it.”

She was unprepared for one side effect of the operation--an incredible, powerful feeling of bliss. “It’s a really special, emotional thing. We all kind of live our lives and do the best we can. But to have an opportunity to do something so right is just outstanding. You feel so good. . . . I look at my brother and think, ‘I did that for him.’ ”

Vinny and Patty talk every day now, joking, exchanging news of their recoveries, remembering old times like that long-ago moment when Patty’s errant arrow lodged in Vinny’s head.

“Now we’re even, Vin,” said Vinny’s big sister.

“Fine,” said Patty’s little brother.