How one stranger saved six lives.

Twelve people, six donors and six recipients, had a part to play in a series of kidney transplants in Melbourne this week. This, of itself, is not an extraordinary thing.

However, their story becomes quite extraordinary when you consider this: had the twelfth member of that group – a complete stranger who decided to donate a kidney altruistically – not decided to become a living organ donor, none of the transplants would have been able to take place. That final donor formed the last piece in the puzzle, and saved six lives.

The process of indirect kidney matching is referred to as a domino kidney transplant. It is the process of matching those who need kidney transplants but whose only donor options are incompatible, with other people in the same boat, in the hope that somewhere along the line, and utilising however many sets of recipients and donors, a match can be found. However, sometimes finding that coveted match is harder than originally anticipated, which is where altruistic donors, like the hero of Thursday’s surgery, come in.

Domino kidney transplants in Australia is organised by the Australian Paired Kidney Exchange (AKX) Programme, an initiative of the Australian government’s Organ and Tissue Authority.

As is explained on their website:

The AKX Programme helps patients seeking a kidney transplant, whose potential living donor is unsuitable for them due to blood group and/or tissue incompatibility.

This option is known as paired kidney exchange or paired kidney donation.

The AKX Programme uses a computer programme to search the entire available database of registered recipient/donor pairs to look for combinations where the donor in an incompatible pair can be matched to a recipient in another pair. If the computer finds a compatible match, two or more simultaneous transplants can occur by exchanging donors.

(And, yes, for those Grey’s Anatomy fans, this is exactly like the season five episode ‘There’s no ‘I’ in Team’, where Bailey organises a twelve-man domino kidney transplant. But obviously much better, because a) it is real life b) we have a national, universal healthcare system which means people like Bailey don’t have to become the middle man between parties and c) no one tried to pull out because they realised their ill spouse was having an affair.)

Mamamia spoke to Royal Melbourne Hospital theatre nurse Sylvia Whiteside about what it was like being in the operating theatre when some of the transplants were taking place.

Whiteside has been a theatre nurse at Royal Melbourne for over 30 years. She says that co-ordinating and witnessing the first 6-way domino kidney transplant in Australia “was absolutely phenomenal”.

“The whole day has this absolute buzz to it and I’m getting a lot of feedback as to how it all went.”

Speaking about organ donation more generally, Whiteside explains that the best possible matches come from within the family.

“The best match to get a kidney [from] is an identical twin, and then it goes to mother, father, brother, sister etc. These are called live matches.”

The next best matches are based on blood type without a familial connection. However, there are problems facing organ donation in Australia. “With the decrease of the road toll (which is a good thing), we’ve found there aren’t as many kidneys,” Whiteside says.

“The problem with that is there aren’t enough people willing to donate their kidneys.”

If you would like to learn more about organ donation, visit the Australian government’s Donate Life website.