It was all for love

TRINIDADIAN kidney recipient Germaine Allum said yesterday she was never scared during the 11-hour transplant operation, while her fianc?, Paul Boissiere, also from Trinidad, said he gave away one of his kidneys for love. “What man wouldn’t do that for his wife?” Boissiere told Newsday from the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Centre, where he was visiting Allum, a 28-year-old accountant with Ernst and Young. The two are not married but are engaged and have been together for 13 years and live together on Majuba Cross Road, Petit Valley. From the Johns Hopkins Centre, Allum told Newsday yesterday she is doing very well and should be discharged from the Baltimore, Maryland, institution in about three days time. “I’m doing great and everything went smoothly.  Love is a big part of it.  The kidney is working really well,” Allum told Newsday. Allum and her fianc? won’t be back to Trinidad right away though, since she said she has to be constantly monitored.  “I will be on medication for the rest of my life,” she said, adding that she and her fianc? might be back in the country at the end of September.

Allum was one of three people to receive a kidney transplant in what is believed to be the world’s first simultaneous “triple swap” kidney transplant operation done last Monday at Johns Hopkins Centre. The donors were Julia Tower, 57, of Hyattsville; Connie Dick, 41, from Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and Boissiere, who is from Majuba Cross Road, Petit Valley. The recipients in the historic transplant were Allum, Jeremy Weiser-Warschoff, 13, from Silver Spring, and Tracy Stahl, 39, from Jonestown, Pa. To make it possible for Allum, Boissiere donated one of his kidneys to Weiser-Warschoff, whom he only met on Saturday, even though they had been linked for the last five days by the teenager’s newly implanted kidney. Allum told Newsday that she was never scared because she had been through so much before the transplants.  She said she had been admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a Canadian hospital in January for six months.  She said her lungs had collapsed, had two cardiac arrests and she had no muscles left.

After her stay at the Canadian hospital, Allum was flown back to Trinidad where she was forced to use a wheelchair, then graduated to walking sticks. Boissiere, an electrical engineer, badly wanted to assist his fianc? in any way possible, and desperate for assistance, the couple then inquired at Johns Hopkins Centre. However, Boissiere’s blood, Type A, was incompatible with Allum’s Type B blood, but he was willing to donate one of his kidneys to a stranger, in Weiser-Marschoff. “We have been together for so long, and I hope any man would do the same,” Boissiere said.  He was discharged on Monday and said he is doing just fine. Allum’s kidney problems started in 1998, when she found out that both of her kidneys were diseased.  They then failed, shrunk then disappeared.  Since then she has been living on medication, Allum said. Allum said she believes she picked up the kidney problem from her school.  “It is such a coincidence that some students of Holy Name have kidney problems.” She added that none of her family members have a history of kidney problems. Her father-in-law Ashley Boissiere claimed a child at the school had a virus, after which four students ended up with kidney problems.  He said one of them has since died from renal failure. The New York Times reported that the transplants cost about US$92,000 each, but Ashley Boissiere told Newsday that the transplant cost much more than the quoted figure. The elder Boissiere said they were able to raise the money through several fund-raisers organised by various people, whom he thanked.