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THE GIFT OF LIFE TIMES FIVE
On January 8, 2002, Robin Steel was wheeled into an operating room at one
Washington, D.C. hospital. At the same time, a very ill 22-month old
toddler was being prepped for surgery down the block at another. Robin
didn’t know the child, the parents, the child’s name, age or whether it
was a boy or a girl. What she did know was that she herself would undergo major
surgery so that this child might have a second chance at life. It was a trip to
the operating room that had begun ten years earlier with her husband, Jim O’Bryant.
One morning in May 1992, Jim suddenly suffered a brain aneurysm and later died. Amidst the hospital waiting room chaos, Robin recalled a moment a few years earlier when Jim had mentioned that he wanted to be an organ donor. In the hospital, she thought “Is this a situation where organ donation could apply?”
“I was helpless to heal him, to change his death, but I could do this. It became very important to me to make sure it happened,” says Robin. Jim’s heart, liver and kidneys ended up saving the lives of four people.
During the next ten years, Robin often volunteered to speak about organ donation but it disturbed her that so many people still waited for transplants, and how many died waiting.
Then one day it dawned on Robin that her own donation was not automatic. What if she has a heart attack, dies in her sleep or of cancer? So, with the ever-increasing waiting list in her mind, Robin began to search for a way to ensure that she would donate her organs.
“I said to myself, ‘I can’t give up my lungs or heart before I die, but I can give up a kidney and that would matter to someone.’” Living kidney donation was something Robin was hearing more about. Her largest problem was that she didn’t actually know anyone who needed a kidney.
In October 2000, Robin watched a presentation by the Washington Regional Transplant Consortium (WRTC) who had created the Washington Regional Voluntary Living Donor Program. The program allows a person to donate a kidney to whomever best matches without actually knowing who receives it. Robin thought, “There it is!” Her bottom line was she was young and healthy and didn’t want to run the risk of dying without passing on the gift of life to someone who needed it. From Jim’s death she had learned that tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Tests, both physical and mental, followed more tests. After each step, her file had to be reviewed and approved by a panel of physicians. But finally Robin was cleared and she decided to schedule the surgery for January 2002.
As she was being prepped for surgery, her doctor entered and asked Robin for permission to remove a vein from her leg if necessary. “What's the problem?” Robin wanted to know immediately. That was when Robin learned that a child had best matched her kidney and surgeons might need a vein from Robin to help connect the kidney in the child.
“That was a little bit overwhelming,” says Robin. To know a child would receive Robin’s gift gave Robin the first – and only -- twinges of nervousness. Right before she was wheeled into the operating room, Robin said to her transplant coordinator, “I was prepared for anyone but a child.”
After the surgery, Robin experienced some discomfort and pain, especially at first. She slept upright in her Lazy-Boy recliner for a few weeks because her stomach muscles couldn’t – or wouldn’t -- raise her body out of a flat bed. But one month later, she was back to work full-time.
Nearly a year later, the identity of the toddler who received Robin’s gift remains unknown to her. She has been told that it was a girl. She knows the toddler suffered from renal failure at birth and doctors had decided that the girl’s best chance was a living donor.
Robin says the best part of her experience is knowing she has done what she could to help save someone’s life. When asked about the worst part of her donation, Robin answers, “that my donated kidney didn’t weigh ten additional pounds.”
