Kidney donation forges childhood friendship
BARBARA PETERS SMITH,Sarasota Herald-Tribune
SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) — One day, they're sitting next to each other, alphabetically arranged in a seventh-grade homeroom at Bradenton's Southeast Junior-Senior High: White and Williams. Another, they're flipping a coin to see who will run for senior class president: Mike or Ed.
Decades later, they're 57 and praying together on Tampa General Hospital's third floor, minutes before two surgical teams are to perform a kidney transplant: out of Ed Williams, into Mike White.
"In high school, if I needed a piece of paper, Mike would be the first one to hand it to me," Ed explains. "This is the same thing, pretty much."
Not quite. Doctors succeeded with the first living-donor kidney transplant in 1954, about when Ed Williams and Mike White were born. But the procedure is far from routine.
And as Williams and White built the kind of steady, unquestioned connection that seems increasingly rare, medical advances created the potential for the ultimate test of their friendship.
Ed's gift to Mike last November was one of the 6,000 living-donor kidney transplants performed annually in this country. About five dozen of those are at Tampa General — the only transplant center in Southwest Florida — according to its latest annual tally.
The traditional kind of transplant — from a deceased donor — is twice as common. But live donations offer better three-year survival odds for adults: 90.4 percent nationally, compared with 82 percent for conventional transplants.
Both men express a quiet wonder about the life-altering experience of sharing an organ. The word "humbling" comes up a lot.
"I don't know if I ever would have thought about it if it wasn't Mike," admits Ed, a state probation officer. "I just wish more people would consider it and not be scared. It's kind of a long ordeal — the process you've got to go through — but there wasn't anything hard about it. And I got five weeks' vacation out of it."
Mike knows this was no vacation. When he talks about it, his husky voice has a way of locking up. But he was not surprised, he says, that it was Ed who gave him his life back.
"We've known each other so long, there doesn't need to be a whole lot said," he says. He only needed to make sure Ed knew "that if the shoe were on the other foot, I would have done the same."
BARBARA PETERS SMITH,Sarasota Herald-Tribune
SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) — One day, they're sitting next to each other, alphabetically arranged in a seventh-grade homeroom at Bradenton's Southeast Junior-Senior High: White and Williams. Another, they're flipping a coin to see who will run for senior class president: Mike or Ed.
Decades later, they're 57 and praying together on Tampa General Hospital's third floor, minutes before two surgical teams are to perform a kidney transplant: out of Ed Williams, into Mike White.
"In high school, if I needed a piece of paper, Mike would be the first one to hand it to me," Ed explains. "This is the same thing, pretty much."
Not quite. Doctors succeeded with the first living-donor kidney transplant in 1954, about when Ed Williams and Mike White were born. But the procedure is far from routine.
And as Williams and White built the kind of steady, unquestioned connection that seems increasingly rare, medical advances created the potential for the ultimate test of their friendship.
Ed's gift to Mike last November was one of the 6,000 living-donor kidney transplants performed annually in this country. About five dozen of those are at Tampa General — the only transplant center in Southwest Florida — according to its latest annual tally.
The traditional kind of transplant — from a deceased donor — is twice as common. But live donations offer better three-year survival odds for adults: 90.4 percent nationally, compared with 82 percent for conventional transplants.
Both men express a quiet wonder about the life-altering experience of sharing an organ. The word "humbling" comes up a lot.
"I don't know if I ever would have thought about it if it wasn't Mike," admits Ed, a state probation officer. "I just wish more people would consider it and not be scared. It's kind of a long ordeal — the process you've got to go through — but there wasn't anything hard about it. And I got five weeks' vacation out of it."
Mike knows this was no vacation. When he talks about it, his husky voice has a way of locking up. But he was not surprised, he says, that it was Ed who gave him his life back.
"We've known each other so long, there doesn't need to be a whole lot said," he says. He only needed to make sure Ed knew "that if the shoe were on the other foot, I would have done the same."
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