For Cheryl and Frank Kimchick, living donation is a family affair! While their kidney donations occurred a few weeks apart, they were in it together and love sharing their story.
The couple’s story began with Cheryl’s brother needing a heart transplant and Cheryl seeing the impact that a heart donation meant to her brother, who had an additional eight years of life. While serving on the New Jersey Organ and Tissue Sharing Network Foundation, she learned more about living donation and started researching non-directed kidney donation. As she learned more, she became excited to become an organ donor. Her husband Frank, was very supportive of the concept.
As part of her intake for living donation, Cheryl met with Dr. Mulgunkar at the Living Donor Institute at Barnabas Health in Livingston, NJ, and Frank came along with her. Dr. Mulgunkar thoroughly explained the kidney donation process, then turned to Frank to ask what he thought. Frank’s responded with “How would you like two?”. Dr. Mulgunkar and Cheryl nearly fell off their chairs. What an amazing procedure to go through together!
The entire testing process took the Kimchick’s about 1.5 years. The philosophy is to ensure the safety of the donor. With certain markers not perfect for them, they were tested throughout that time period until all markers were within the safety range for donation.
Cheryl had her surgery in April of 2019. Frank had his July, 2019. Although they wanted have surgeries at the same time, the Institute was not willing to do that, just in case one of us needed assistance through the recovery process.
Both surgeries were a success. They both went in early in the morning and were home by the next day for dinner. Both were out of bed the day of surgery. Cheryl’s kidney stayed in NJ and Frank’s was flown to Illinois.
Simply amazing and easy procedure.
Both recoveries were calm and pretty much painless. They walked a lot in those first four weeks post-surgery and then built up their exercise over time after that.
Cheryl did indicate that the decision to donate a kidney, and go through with it, was easier than her decision to let her hair go natural (mostly gray now).
Both say if they could do this again, they would in a heartbeat. The knowledge that should anything happen to either of their remaining kidney’s, their names go to the top of the list for kidney donation made the decision even easier. They never had doubts or second thoughts, and absolutely would recommend anyone who is healthy to undertake this beautiful contribution to life.
