Lisa Walsh-Kirk and Jessica Pelletier have shared a lot of the same ups and downs of living with kidney disease. And now, thanks to a lot of good luck, they’re living with parts of the same kidney.
Walsh-Kirk, 24, and Pelletier, 30, met years ago, when they were both young patients at Halifax’s IWK Health Centre. Pelletier has been living with kidney disease since she was two years old, while Walsh-Kirk first got ill when she was 12. They met at the hospital's dialysis clinic.
“We became really good friends. We were roommates and we had transplants around the same time,” Walsh-Kirk tells CTV Atlantic.
When both transplants failed, the pair had to go back on dialysis to keep their ailing kidneys going while their names were placed back on wait lists.
Then, not long ago, both women received the phone calls they had been waiting for: two kidneys had become available that were good matches for both women. (The date of the surgery is being kept confidential in the interest of protecting the anonymity of the donor.)
But neither woman realized the other had both been called until they bumped into each other in the hospital.
“I was sitting in this room and I saw her (Pelletier) walking down the hall and I was like ‘What are you doing here?’” says Walsh-Kirk.
“I’m like, ‘I’m getting a kidney!’” says Pelletier. “She’s like, ‘Me too!’”
Pelletier and Kirk-Walsh soon figured out that with so few kidney donors available and with them getting their phone calls within minutes of each other, they must be getting kidneys from the same donor.
Urology surgeon Dr. Joseph Lawen performed both surgeries; he had also performed both women’s first transplants years ago.
Lawen says the friends’ situation is almost unheard of.
“For them to have been friends and to have similar histories -- first transplants lost some number of years later and then to end up back in the OR on the same day, receiving kidneys from the same donor -- that’s really interesting,” he says.
Lawen says both are doing “very well” with their new kidneys, noting their blood work returned to normal within 24 hours of the operations.
Pelletier says having had the transplants together means even more to them because they experienced it together.
“Just to know that it was somebody that I knew quite well was getting the other kidney, made it that more special, because I’ve seen her struggles,” says Pelletier.
Now, with new kidneys and new outlooks on life, each is busy planning for the future.
“I have a lot of goals. I’m getting married. I can start a new life,” says Walsh-Kirk. “I feel alive. I have reasons to smile and get up in the morning and things to look forward to.”
“I get a chance to live, and I didn’t think I would,” she adds, choking back tears.
Pelletier meanwhile is looking forward to being with her husband and daughter again. “Just to have my weekends back with my little girl, family days … it just means everything to us.”
Kidney patients who need transplants are typically on a waiting list for about three years in Canada, though both Pelletier and Walsh-Kirk waited longer.
About 4,300 Canadians are currently on waiting lists for organ donations – nearly 80 per cent of them waiting for kidneys.
Every year, about 80 Canadians die while waiting for kidney transplants. But for those lucky enough to find a donor, transplant success rates are very good. Transplants from deceased donors have an 85 to 90 per cent success rate for the first year; live donor transplants have a 90 to 95 per cent success rate.
Now the pair has a special message to share: “Sign your donor cards,” says Walsh-Kirk. “You can save somebody’s life.”
With a report from CTV Atlantic's Kayla Hounsell
