St. Paul native Catherine Garvey fell into her nursing specialty more or less by accident. She graduated from the College of St. Catherine in 1975, at a time when few nursing jobs were available. She decided to jump at the sole opportunity available at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, Fairview, where she had been a student nursing assistant in pediatrics.
“There was one job open,” she says. “It was in transplant. I looked at it and I thought, ‘Oh, what the heck.’”
Her job, as it is now, was to shepherd patients and donors through the organ transplantation process: walk them through referrals, facilitate testing and evaluations, counsel potential donors, and follow up with recipients for the rest of their lives in order to ensure the success of the organ. It was satisfying work. But she started to notice missed opportunities.
“In the mid-1990s, there were times when we’d get calls from people wanting to donate [a kidney or part of a liver] to somebody they didn’t know, or hardly knew,” she says.
The thinking was, why would an unrelated, unconnected person want to do something so major? But eventually a case came along that made them reconsider their opinions.
“One patient who needed a kidney had been a graduate of the Boys’ Town system,” she recalls. “None of his relatives could donate. He sent a Christmas letter to every other graduate of the Boys’ Town system in the country, explaining his need for a kidney. Well, I got a call from a fellow in Texas who said he was willing to help. But during the screening, when it came out that he didn’t know the man, I stopped everything. The next day I got a call from the recipient, saying ‘Who are you to decide who my family is?’ And actually, he made a good point.”
So Garvey sat down with a team of surgeons, nephrologists, bioethicists, nurses, an attorney, and the patient. It took nine months to hammer out a protocol to begin to accept these new potential donors.
“Lo and behold, there are a lot of really, really nice people out there,” Garvey says. “Doing this is just one more way they live their life. Most of them are multi-gallon blood donors. They’ve registered themselves on the marrow registry, in case someone needs bone marrow. Many of them have spiritual or religious reasons.”
This new donor protocol opened the door for what Garvey and her team call “nondirected” donations, where individuals volunteer to give a kidney (or another organ) to someone completely unknown to them. She says that across the country, the new model is starting to take hold.
“It’s not going to solve the organ shortage in and of itself,” she says. “But we’ve shown that it can be done safely, and the outcomes are good. I work with healthy people who want to do this great and wonderful thing, so I’m very fortunate that way.”
