By The Survivors Club Staff
July 8, 2009

It all started one Sunday when a Virginia man read his church bulletin.  A stranger in his parish needed a kidney so Thomas F. Koontz offered one of his own.  Koontz was grateful to God that his teenage daughter Sage had recently been saved from brain cancer.  When Koontz's fellow parishioner found a more suitable donor, he called Johns Hopkins Hospital, asking if anyone else needed a kidney.

With this single action, the 54-year-old Marine's started a chain of events, as The Baltimore Sun describes, that allowed eight - yes, eight -- people to get new kidneys, enabling them to survive and thrive in the face of kidney failure and other life-threatening kidney problems.

"God helped me, so I was trying to give something back to God," he told The Sun.  "You only need one kidney."

Doctors at hospitals in four states transplanted eight kidneys over three weeks in what is considered the largest domino organ donation in history, according to the Associated Press. Ten doctors performed 16 surgeries on the eight donors and eight recipients at Hopkins, Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, INTEGRIS Baptist Memorial Center in Oklahoma City and Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Recipients and donors were thrilled to be part of history.

"My kidney lives and pees in St. Louis right now," said a teary Pamela Paulk, a 55-year-old donor and a vice president of human resources at Johns Hopkins.

One transplant surgeon who completed the unprecedented eight-way kidney swap says this kind of intricate, multistate exchange can drastically reduce the number of patients waiting for eligible donors.  "We finally beat the 'Grey's Anatomy' record for domino transplants," Montgomery joked at a news conference.  "We hope this creates a movement that encourages other transplant centers to adopt the model we used."

The donor pool in the United States could facilitate 1,500 transplants per year if transplant centers nationwide participated in computer modeling that matches donors with recipients, Montgomery said.

Multiple-kidney transplants occur when several people who need transplants have friends or relatives who are willing to donate kidneys but aren't compatible. A chain of surgeries is arranged in which each donor is matched with a transplant candidate who they don't know but is compatible with the kidney being given up. The chain of transplants typically also involve a so-called altruistic donor, who's willing to give a kidney to anyone and is located through a database.

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