At age 15, Jessica Kahigian was playing nearly every sport she could: soccer, basketball, and lacrosse.
So she said she was surprised when she went in for routine blood work and found out she needed a kidney transplant.
She recalls the day she was driving in for surgery a year later.
“It was just a whirlwind of emotions, I live two hours away so I cried for two hours,” Kahigian said.
That surgery went well. For the next 15 years, her transplanted kidney worked normally. Then she got COVID-19 in 2023, and the virus attacked her transplant. Kahigan needed a new kidney again, at 31, joining the nearly 100,000 people waiting for kidney transplants across the country.
As she waited for a match for two years, she spent nine hours a week going to dialysis, taking up a lot of her time. Her neighbor, Bill Hayes, who’s known Kahigian’s family for 10 years, wanted to help. He offered to donate his kidney, but he wasn’t a match.
The two have been trying to raise awareness about kidney donation and recently attended an event at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center hosted by Kidneys for Kids, a non-profit that tries to help find donors for young people. The organization, in partnership with the National Kidney Registry, is hoping to increase the number of people who sign up to be kidney donors this year to over 7,000.
While Kahigian waited for another match, Hayes ended up donating his kidney to someone he didn’t know.
“I hope their quality of life improved and that they're enjoying their life more than they were,” Hayes said.
Hayes said the hardest part of donating his kidney was waiting to figure out if he was going to be a match. But his nutritionist told him he had to make some adjustments: no more nightly pints of Ben & Jerry’s.
Hayes said he’s a chocoholic but he’s down to one pint per week. He said he’ll still indulge in a pint of Cherry Garcia if he has the chance, but overall it’s been worth it to cut back.
“It makes you feel good. It gives you a really good purpose knowing that you have the opportunity to give someone a better quality of life and not really change the quality of yours,” Hayes said.
Hayes said he feels just as good now as when he donated but there’s still a big deficit of people who need transplants and people who donate them.
Dr. Michael Daily, a transplant surgeon and section chief at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, said the average age of the people who come to Dartmouth Hitchcock who need a kidney transplant are around the age of 60, but he’s also had to operate on kids.
“Your kidneys specifically aren't designed to live as long as we are and so every year after you're 30, you lose some kidney function,” Daily said.
High blood pressure, diabetes, previous damage to kidneys can all affect kidney function.
“There are kids who are born without kidneys,” Daily said. “There are kids who are born with kidneys that didn't get formed right or they don't filter right, or they've got cysts in them that are preventing them from functioning effectively. So there are kids that almost immediately have to go on dialysis.”
Children can receive adult, full-sized transplants, even infants. A surgery for a small child can be difficult because there’s not a lot of room for an adult sized kidney to fit, Daily said. Yet dialysis, for babies in particular, can be difficult because they’re so small.
Daily said it’s better for kids to get a transplant rather than be on dialysis because it can impact their development.
“We know that these kids on dialysis aren't going to grow like regular kids,” Daily said. “They're not going to be able to go to school like regular kids. They have to take time out of their life to do dialysis when they'd rather be playing basketball or swimming.”
Kahigian did end up finding a donor match and had her surgery early in the morning on July 3rd, at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Leading up to it, she was asking everyone she knows to spread awareness and to consider donating a kidney.
“Even if it's not for me but someone else, you can still live a very healthy life like our neighbor Bill,” she said.
