A Trini love story

AT A TIME when so much in our public life is depressing and uncertain, two young Trinidadians have provided us with a love story to warm our hearts and lift our troubled spirits.

The story of Paul Boissiere and his fiancee Germaine Allum, in fact, has been featured in the New York Times since it makes medical history, the two being part of the first simultaneous triple-swap kidney transplant operation ever performed. True love, as the saying goes, will always find a way, and the Petit Valley couple found it eventually when they sought the help of doctors at the John Hopkins Centre in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

For the last five years, Paul, a 30-year-old electrical engineer, watched Germaine, an accountant with Ernst and Young, suffer the debilitating effects of her failing kidneys. The organs were diseased and eventually collapsed. Since then, she has been living on medical treatment and the hope of having a transplant. She spent the first six months of this year in the Intensive Care Unit of a Canadian hospital. Germaine told Newsday that her lungs had collapsed, she had two cardiac arrests and her muscles had atrophied. When she returned home to Petit Valley, the 28-year-old accountant was forced to use a wheelchair, then graduated to walking sticks. When her condition deteriorated again, Germaine went to a hospital in Coral Gables, Florida, where her heart stopped twice.

Paul wanted desperately to relieve the suffering of his teenage sweetheart — they have been close for 13 years — by giving her one of his kidneys but that was not feasible since their blood types were incompatible. As fate would have it, a solution finally arose when Paul informed doctors at John Hopkins that he would be willing to donate one of his kidneys to a total stranger, 13-year-old Jeremy Weiserwarschoff with whom he shared a compatible blood type. By its "matchmaker" system  of determining compatibility among the many kidney patients waiting for transplants, John Hopkins was able to arrange the first simultaneous three-way kidney exchange in which Germaine would receive an organ from another stranger. In return for Paul's kidney, a friend of Jeremy's family donated a kidney to Tracey Stahl, a very ill mother of two from Johnston, Pennsylvania, and, in turn, Tracey's sister, Connie Dick of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, gave her kidney to Germaine. The historic operation was performed on Monday July 28, by three surgical teams who worked 11 hours from 7 am to 6 pm. Speaking to Newsday sunday, Germaine gave us the good news that she was doing well and should be discharged from the Baltimore hospital in about three days time. "I'm doing great and everything went smoothly," she said. "Love is a big part of it. The kidney is working really well."

Germaine and Paul, however, would not be back home immediately after her discharge since she still has to be monitored for some time. "I will be on medication for the rest of my life" she noted, adding that she and Paul may be back in Trinidad by September. In his turn, a much-relieved Paul said he gave away one of his kidneys for love. "We have been together for so long," he said. "I hope that any man would do the same for his wife." The couple plan to marry soon, beginning a new chapter of their lives without the crisis in Germaine's health to worry about. Love, as the saying goes, will find a way but, as the story of Paul and Germaine tells us, that way is often determined by how much of yourself you are willing to give.  At a time when crime and acts of violence are threatening the peace and harmony of our society, it is reconciling and heartening to know that Trinis can love like that.