Vertis Boyce had been on the kidney donation wait list for 8 1/2 years. She got the call about a potential life-changing surgery. The donated organ had a backstory that a doctor would need to explain. “The backstory was that this was the second time it had been transplanted. So I would be the second receiver of that kidney,” Boyce told Healthline. Boyce didn’t hesitate and agreed to do the surgery.Boyce received that kidney in July of last year. It was the second of three times Dr. Jeffrey Veale, director of the UCLA Kidney Transplantation Exchange Program at UCLA Medical Center, re-transplanted a previously donated kidney last year.
Such re-transplantations are very rare — only possible in unique circumstances in which a recipient of a kidney dies without damaging the kidney, hasn’t had the kidney long enough to wear it out, is a match for someone on the list, and hasn’t developed excessive scar tissue from the previous operation.
But Veale says about 25 percent of recipients of donated kidneys die with a functioning kidney that could be reused. Typically, those kidneys go to waste. If more were salvaged, he thinks, it could save hundreds of lives a year among the more than 80 percent of people on wait lists that never receive a kidney.
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