An Extraordinary Gift, Given Without Strings, to a Stranger

For a couple of hours, Terry Rose lay just an operating room away from the man who would receive her kidney.

He was a total stranger then. He still is.

And Rose, well, she is one of a tiny group of extraordinary givers who take philanthropy to a new level. The 47-year-old Newport Beach woman decided one day to give away her kidney, because, she points out, she needs only one.

She didn’t care who got it, as long as it did some good.

Family and friends were astounded by her decision, prompted by an article in People magazine about a North Carolina schoolteacher who donated a kidney to a student.

That’s how it routinely works: A kidney goes to a friend or co-worker, a mother or sibling. But hardly ever to a stranger. Last year, there might have been 30 cases nationwide involving living anonymous donors.

Rose, who is single, doesn’t quite understand the commotion.

“To me, it’s no big deal,” she said. “It’s like giving a pint of blood.”

On Tuesday, the transplant team at UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange will help Rose come face to face with her mystery man, the 28-year-old from Westminster who waited nearly four years for a kidney. Now he has three--two shriveled, failing ones and, since Dec. 14, her healthy, fist-sized organ.

She will see his healthy glow, his easy walk, no longer sluggish. She will ask the questions she’s been eager to ask: How are you? Who are you? How is life different? And, though she admits to being a little reserved, she might even hug him.

She wants to be sure, she joked, that another man isn’t rejecting her.

The stranger, now healthy and happily planning his future, has a few excited questions of his own, including one that rises above all others: Why?

Their meeting is just a couple of days away, a wait that is nothing compared with the journey that started in November 1999, when Rose first saw the story in People. She read about Jane Smith, a 42-year-old teacher who is white, and Michael Carter, a 14-year-old black student, and realized kidney donors do not have to be related, nor must they be the same age or ethnicity.

Someone out there must match her, she thought.

“I think I literally pulled out the Yellow Pages,” Rose said.

She came across the UC Irvine Medical Center, where doctors were surprised but not unfamiliar with what she wanted to do. In June 1998, they had quietly performed one of the country’s first anonymous kidney donations--a case the hospital’s ethics committee reviewed extensively before giving it the nod. The phenomenon is so new that some hospitals still won’t perform such operations.

Guidelines Planned for Anonymous Donors

Doctors, ethicists, social workers and health care professionals continue to grapple with difficult questions. The National Kidney Foundation, for example, plans a conference in May in Boston that will address guidelines and standard practices for these altruistic donors. It may also tackle other ethical dilemmas, such as whether a donor can attach restrictions on who gets a kidney.

None of that was an issue in Rose’s case.

“I had no qualms about who it went to: red, yellow, black, white, male or female,” Rose said. “If you’re going to attach strings, you’re not really ready to give.”

Still, there were other potential roadblocks.

Before the hospital would consider Rose, its staff had to make sure she was sincere, expected no money, had no family history of kidney disease and wasn’t mentally unbalanced, said Dr. David Imagawa, chief of transplantation at UC Irvine Medical Center.

Rose did her own research, reflected on her life and weighed the options. She had no children, and also thought it unlikely that any relative would need a kidney.

Doctors put Rose through tests that stretched over seven months. She was in and out of the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, X-rays, an angiogram, mammogram, Pap smear, blood test, urine test, abdominal ultrasound and tuberculosis skin test.

Rose passed each test--not surprising for a woman whose early claim to fame was perfect school attendance for 13 years, kindergarten through high school, except for the time she was suspended for wearing a miniskirt.

“She never even faked it,” said her sister, Marcia Dial.

Doctors quickly realized Rose was serious. “She is an individual who had spent the better part of her life doing things to help others,” Imagawa said.

She has given blood and platelets for years, as often as once a month. She donates to United Way, paints homes for the elderly, and whips out her checkbook to sponsor people in walkathons or contribute to office collections.

But a kidney?

Friends looked at her as if she were crazy. Her mother promptly forbade her to undergo the operation. Even now, her sister said, “I think it was a very noble and generous thing, but I still don’t really understand it. . . . I have a hard time believing that doctors would readily do it. You have two eyes--should you give one away because you only need one?”

But Rose would not be dissuaded. “She’s always had her own mind and been strong-willed and determined,” Dial said.

Her employer, the city of Santa Ana, was supportive. Her bosses hired temporary help in the planning department, where she works as a senior office assistant, during the few weeks Rose was away.

As the surgery date drew near, Rose grew nervous but never once considered backing out, even after the false alarms. One recipient proved incompatible. Another time surgery was postponed because of the doctor’s schedule.

“It’s like a trip,” she said. “You get all excited and then they cancel it because of the rain.”

She became frustrated, almost eager to be rid of the kidney. Rose, who travels overseas a lot, planned no international trips for fear she might contract a strange disease.

“I thought of nothing last year but this,” she said. “Everything was on hold.”

Not far away, the Westminster man had put his life, even his wedding, on hold, too. He coughed up blood, complained of constant weariness. His feet and face were swollen. His complexion was sallow; his skin itchy. He stopped working at his family’s video store and spent most days indoors, undergoing in-home dialysis four times a day.

He tried to recruit family and friends to donate a kidney. His father and cousin didn’t match, and others could not look beyond a Vietnamese cultural belief that the body should remain whole.

So he waited. He and his fiancee called the transplant center monthly, sometimes more, checking his place on the waiting list. Every time, he asked the transplant coordinator, “Where am I?”

Every time, he heard the same answer. “You’re right there. We’re just waiting for the perfect match.”

Curiosity Builds for Giver, Receiver

When the word came last November, after almost four years on the list, he was too scared to hope, too sick not to.

As the anticipation built, so did the curiosity--on both sides.

Rose gleaned little details about the recipient. Doctors referred to him neutrally as the “recipient,” but now and then dropped the pronoun “him,” a nugget she immediately passed along to Sandi Ault, a friend at work. Later, Rose learned he was Vietnamese.

Every new tidbit, Ault said, was “a curious kind of ‘wow.’ ”

The morning of the surgery, Rose got to the hospital at 7 a.m. She paced the hallways. She talked to a woman in the bed next to hers and tried to read a book--”some trashy paperback”--that has since faded from memory.

She remembers resting on the gurney, the jitters growing, as the anesthesiologist struggled to find a vein. In an adjacent operating room was the recipient. He remembers the IV dripping and his final fear: that the donor would change her mind.

Their procedures overlapped and doctors rolled Rose’s iced kidney on a cart to the next operating room. They didn’t bother to remove the recipient’s bad kidneys, which would shrivel up like prunes.

“The first hurdle is really in the operating room,” Imagawa said. “Obviously, things can go wrong. The kidney can be rejected immediately.”

But within hours, it was fully functioning. When the young man awoke, he immediately felt the urge to urinate, leaving little doubt the new kidney worked. It was, he said, a welcome feeling.

Donor and recipient recovered at the medical center on two different floors in opposite units. How strange to think, they both said, that they might have unknowingly passed in the hallway.

One day after the surgery, Rose received a dozen long-stemmed roses in her room. Along with a handwritten card addressed to the “unknown angel” was a gold and red plaque that read, simply: “In appreciation of our family, Dinh. Thank you.”

She read it again, surprised. Finally, she knew the stranger’s name, the person whose life is forever bound to hers.

She sent him a Christmas card, wishing him a speedy recovery. “I feel great and have no regrets,” she wrote.

She signed it “Terry.”

And for the first time, he knew his benefactor’s name.

Or at least her first name. He still didn’t know she is Terry Rose; she didn’t know his full name--Minh Dinh. They wanted to meet immediately.

Their doctors said no, get over the humps. First the surgery, then Week 1. After that, 90 days.

They warned Rose she might feel depressed, as if she had given birth but was unable to take the baby home. But sadness never came, only the curiosity and the worry over Dinh.

He kept getting stronger. He went home within a week, eating ravenously and urinating multiple times a day. He stayed awake throughout the day, no longer needing naps. He started gardening again and planting spring flowers.

Sometimes Dinh, a slender man, reaches down and pats his lower right side. He can feel Rose’s kidney.

“It’s very strange,” he said. “I keep asking the doctor, ‘Is this my kidney right here?’ ”

Last Wednesday, Dinh passed the three-month hurdle “with flying colors,” Imagawa said. The hospital, true to its word, immediately made plans to help them meet.

This is a day Dinh and his fiancee, Jocelyn Nguyen, have been waiting for. They keep Rose’s card tucked away to show their future children. They will say: “This is your daddy’s lifesaver.”

They plan to thank her, though they have yet to find the right words. They doubt they ever will. But they will tell her about their wedding, which is planned for December.

And Rose, no longer a stranger, will be the first invited guest.

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Kidney Facts

48,200 people are waiting for a kidney in the United States.

12,488 kidney transplants were performed in 1999.

In 1999, 3,046 people died waiting for a kidney, compared to 734 in 1988.

A kidney weighs 5-6 ounces and is roughly the size of a fist. The kidneys are located in the back, just below the rib cage.

For more information about organ donation, call the National Kidney Foundation at (800) 622-9010 or visit its Web site at www.kidney.org. UC Irvine Medical Center can be reached at (714) 456-8441 or through its Web site at www.ucihealth.com. The center does 15 to 25 kidney transplants per year.

Sources: UCIMC, National Kidney Foundation and United Network for Organ Sharing