Transplant News
PHOENIX (May 19, 2009) --
Violet Lopez (third from left) reads from a scrapbook presented to her by transplant staff after her pioneering kidney transplant
in 1969, the first in Arizona history. The young social worker’s courage kept pace with her fear, but her energy level was reaching empty. She was in pain, rushing to an Arizona hospital. Her kidneys were failing. It was early 1969. She was 25, the youngest in the family. “It was horrible, that’s all I remember,” Violet Lopez says today of the pain coursing through her muscles. “It was just awful. It was like an itch, like a really deep tissue itch that I could not satisfy by scratching.”
Violet was nauseous and in a world of hurt. She was restless in the passenger seat, her head down. Shooting anxious glances at her was the driver, Leonor, her older sister.
Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center receives second USHHS Medal of Honor for organ donation rates
PHOENIX (Oct. 20, 2008) – Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center and three other Arizona hospitals will be awarded the Medal of Honor by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for their achievements in raising organ donation rates. This is Banner Good Samaritan’s second HHS Medal of Honor, having earned its previous medal in 2005.
Banner Good Samaritan conducts milestone 300th liver transplant PHOENIX (June 28, 2007) – On Thursday, June 28, transplant surgeons Jeff Brink, M.D.; James Cashman, M.D.; and Lawrence Koep, M.D.; performed the 300th liver transplant at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center, Arizona’s leading provider of organ transplant services.
Gift of kidney begins string of organ donations
PHOENIX (July 22, 2007) - A chain of small miracles started in Phoenix last week. It began when a Michigan man decided to donate one of his kidneys to a person he had never met. His decision means a Phoenix woman will be able to watch her grandchildren grow up. But it does not stop there. Now the Phoenix woman's husband will donate one of his kidneys to a perfect stranger. That woman's best friend will then do the same. And so on and so on.
Organ swap
PHOENIX (Jan. 23, 2007) - Two sisters and their daughters, connected unequivocally by love but less perfectly by tissue- and blood-type compatibility, gathered last fall at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center for the first half of a rare paired kidney exchange.
On Feb. 7, the family will return to the Phoenix hospital, surrounded as before by other relatives and friends. It will be the second set's turn, a niece to give a kidney and an aunt to receive it, completing their paired transplant.
This is how sisters Mary Elandt, 67, of Tucson, and Catherine "Kitty" Shinkle, 65, of Muskego, Wis., came to swap willing but medically incompatible donors - their grown daughters - in the first such exchange performed in Arizona.
Liver transplant outcomes at Banner Good Samaritan are highest in Southwest region
PHOENIX (Aug. 11, 2005) – Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center's liver transplant program has consistently produced the highest patient outcome rates in the Southwest, according to data collected by the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR). Liver transplant program has highest 1-month, 1-year and 3-year survival rates for patients among Arizona-California-Utah hospitals.
