A Bensalem teenager needed a kidney. A New York woman needed to remove hers. After the transplant, they met for the first time
A New York woman had a rare medical condition that required the removal of her kidney. She opted to donate it to a stranger.
Megan Bosack needed her kidney removed. Evelyn Bautista needed a new one.
Their needs made for a perfect match.
Bosack, 21, from Suffern, N.Y., had for years been dealing with a rare condition called nutcracker syndrome, where the vein that carries blood away from the left kidney is compressed, causing severe pain.
Doctors at Temple University Hospital gave Bosack a choice: They could move her kidney to relieve pressure on the vein, or remove it entirely.
Bosack was healthy enough that she could live with one kidney. And her kidney, once removed, could function normally in someone else’s body.
She opted to donate her kidney to a stranger — Bautista, a 17-year-old from Bensalem who had been diagnosed with congenital kidney disease at 11.
On Friday, three weeks after the transplant operation, the two returned to Temple to meet each other for the first time.
“This is so awesome, I don’t know what to say,” Bosack said.
“Thank you so much,” Bautista said quietly, pulling her in for a hug.
Neither had known anything about the other at the time of the transplant. They were surprised to find they were close in age; Bautista is the same age as Bosack’s younger sister. They traded stories about their recovery from the surgeries — both went smoothly — and about their lives before the operation.
Like Bosack, Bautista had battled worsening symptoms over the years. She missed school for dialysis appointments, and often couldn’t muster the energy to see friends or play with her younger siblings. She followed a strict diet and could only drink 30 ounces of liquid a day.
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She waited a year and a half on the transplant list before matching with Bosack.
“I was just in shock at first. I didn’t believe [I had matched with a donor] until I was actually at the hospital,” Bautista said.
“We feel like they are part of our family”
The option to donate a kidney has been embraced by about three in four nutcracker syndrome patients treated by Kenneth Chavin, the director of Temple’s abdominal organ transplant program, in the last two years.
He met his first patient while working in South Carolina nine years ago: a woman in her early 20s who had undergone a surgery to reposition her renal vein and relieve compression. The surgery had failed, and the woman opted to have her kidney removed instead.
Now at Temple, Chavin fields calls from patients around the world. He’s performed 16 operations to remove kidneys and five to reposition them in the last two years.
“Most of the patients that donate are cured of a disease that had been making them not work, keeping them at home. And then you’re helping someone else. It’s just a double win,” he said.
Paul Bosack, Megan’s father, said that if his daughter hadn’t planned to donate her kidney, she could have gotten it removed earlier. But she opted to undergo testing to ensure her kidney found a match, accepting a few more months of chronic pain.
“She would do this in a heartbeat for anybody,” he said.
Bautista’s mother considered her daughter’s transplant a miracle: She’d heard of patients who waited on a transplant list for years. And after the surgery, when she heard the donor’s family was open to meeting, she jumped at the chance.
“They are great, great people, and they have great hearts. We feel like they are part of our family,” Bautista’s mother, Azuzena Aguilar, said in Spanish, speaking through a translator.
Since the surgery, Megan Bosack has returned to her job as a paralegal. No longer in daily pain, she’s going to the gym again, as well as concerts and beach trips with friends. “I’m just getting back into my normal routine,” she said. “Those were things I couldn’t necessarily do before surgery.”
Bautista is starting college in the fall at Bucks County Community College. She’s hoping to pursue a career in medicine.
She marvels at how her life has changed in the simplest ways since receiving her new kidney: She can drink more than a few glasses of water a day. She can meet up with friends without getting tired. She doesn’t have to spend hours at dialysis.
“I’m just excited to be able to leave the house a lot,” she said, laughing.