JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Dr. William Goggins said recently, every day is a gift, and for his patients, that's especially true. Dr. Goggins is a transplant surgeon at Indiana University Health, specifically for kidneys. About 90,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for a kidney, and the wait can last years - an emotional and physical roller coaster as their bodies grow sicker, but if they are lucky, transplant day arrives with Dr. William Goggins holding the scalpel. He recently celebrated the milestone of his 3,000th kidney transplant, and he joins me now to talk about this remarkable feat. Welcome to the program and congratulations.
WILLIAM GOGGINS: Oh, thank you very much.
SUMMERS: OK, I just want to start - 3,000 kidney transplants, more than that, in fact, you've done at this point. I just want to know, does a transplant surgery ever start to feel repetitive to you at all, having done so many of them?
GOGGINS: Yeah, I get that question a lot, and it's not the same. Everybody is unique. Every kidney is unique. The concepts are the same, but the operations have their own unique things, which keeps it very interesting and challenging.
SUMMERS: I, of course, want to respect patient confidentiality when I ask you this next question, but I'm hoping that you can tell us a bit about a patient whose life was changed after kidney transplantation.
GOGGINS: Sure. My 3,000th kidney transplant - this was a woman who was in renal failure, worried that she was never going to get a kidney transplant because she was an older woman. And it just so happens that she ended up getting the transplant, and she looks wonderful. And she has normal kidney function, and she couldn't be happier.
SUMMERS: That's incredible. For folks who don't know, can you tell us what life is like for someone who is really in need of a kidney and maybe is still on that waiting list?
GOGGINS: Life is really hard with renal failure, and when you're on dialysis, you have only a few options. You can do dialysis at home with a tube that's in your abdomen that you have to fill yourself up with fluid a few times a day. And it makes you feel bloated and uncomfortable, but you - at least you're at home. Or you have to go to a center a couple times a week to be able to have needles stuck into your arm and then blood goes through a machine to clean it. And most of my patients just feel exhausted for the rest of the day, and you have to have your fluid limited. You can't eat what you want. A lot of times your blood pressure or your diabetes is worse, and it's a real struggle. Every day is a struggle.
SUMMERS: And what changes for that patient after donation? What kind of changes are there in their life?
GOGGINS: Well, once the kidney wakes up and starts working, my patients are restored to normal physiology. They're basically back to normal. They have to take medication so that they don't reject the kidney transplant, but they can eat what they want. They can drink what they want. They can travel. They're not tied to a machine. They have their life returned to them.
SUMMERS: A kidney is an organ, though, that a living person is able to donate to someone in need. So does - when you think about that long list of people who are awaiting donations, who need a new kidney, does that ever frustrate you?
GOGGINS: Well, as I tell a lot of my patients that are so thankful, I can't do transplants without somebody who is willing to either donate an organ themselves, or a family in a time of grief is able to think past their tragedy to try to help somebody else.
For a living donor, what I would tell people is we don't take kidneys from patients that aren't the healthiest of the healthiest. People go through a very rigorous physical examination, medical examination, to make sure that they don't have anything wrong with their kidneys at present, or they potentially don't have any issues with living with one kidney.
The other thing that I tell them is, say you donate a kidney and things change in your life down in the future, and all of a sudden, your kidneys are failing - or they get to the point where something unpredictable happened and now you're approaching the need for dialysis - well, people that have donated a kidney in the past, they get exception points for the deceased donor list. So they go right to the top of the list. So there's a safety net.
SUMMERS: That's Dr. William Goggins, surgeon at Indiana University Health, who performed his 3,000th kidney transplant earlier this month. Dr. Goggins, thank you for talking with us.
GOGGINS: I appreciate it. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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