Salisbury resident fulfills Ocean City woman's quest for a last-minute kidney donor

Ilene Silverman, a 67-year old retired teacher who lives part-time in Ocean City, was born with only one kidney.

In 2015, she was told it was failing.

Born premature at 3 pounds, 6 ounces, she had a double kidney one one side and none on the other.

Double kidney, or duplex kidney, is not rare, but most patients have a normal kidney on the other side. Part of Silverman's kidney was prone to infection, and that part was removed when she was 4 months old.

Her kidney was damaged from an illness in 2005, and Silverman was told she would be on dialysis in two years if she couldn't find a transplant donor.

"I just cried for two years, and I'm the type of person who smiles all the time, and it's not always because I'm happy," she said.

When no one in her family proved a match, Silverman and her husband Allen started a desperate quest to find one.

They got no results from hours of testing at seven hospitals to get on seven-year waiting lists with more than 150,000 names, and looking into donor matching services in New Jersey and New York.

A letter posted to Facebook pleading for a donor got a lot of sympathy, but no donor. Family and friends posted copies in high schools, hospitals and soup kitchens, but it was to no avail.

As dialysis loomed, a friend from Temple Bat Yam, a Reform Jewish congregation in Berlin that the Silvermans attend in the summer, offered to take the letter to Rabbi Susan Warshaw.

Warshaw sent the letter by email to her congregation in January, with a coda reminding them that being Jewish means helping others.

It found a willing donor in one day.

Rachel White, a 56-year-old Salisbury resident, read the email at work and responded immediately.

White's mother had died from kidney disease, but Warshaw and Silverman didn't learn this until much later.

"When I read Ilene's letter about how she was going to need dialysis and I knew she had young grandchildren, it just spoke to me," White said. "I felt if I could do something to prevent someone from having to go through all that, then I would do it."

But it was almost all for naught.

White responded to a Gmail account that the Silvermans' son Marc had created for their quest. But they had lost the password and didn't know until a month later that White had been trying to reach them.

Her last message said, "I'm already a match, and I have an appointment with my husband to go to Georgetown on March 22."

Georgetown in Washington is the location of MedStar Georgetown University Medical Center. The hospital is one of the top five hospitals in the National Kidney Registry, or NKR, said Dr. Jennifer Verbesey, director of the Living Donor Program.

During screening, White agreed to participate in a paired exchange. Her Type O-positive blood made her a universal donor, which could enable multiple transplants at the same time. NKR facilitates this process by accepting willing donors and prospective recipients in pairs. These pairs need not be a match, because the database can find matches for them elsewhere.

"When they explained it to me, it just seemed like, wow, that's way cooler to be able to donate and start off a chain of donations on one day than to just do one," White said.

During the extensive screening process, both families had to travel to MedStar. Germantown, where Silverman is from, is right outside Washington, but the Whites were driving from Salisbury.

"That poor girl, she had to drive four times to Georgetown, three hours from Salisbury. That's remarkable in itself," Silverman said. "My daughter offered to pay, she said, 'You would be saving my mother's life.'"

But White refused.

Silverman and White had never met until Warshaw introduced them at a Seder in April.

It wasn't the only time Warshaw was asked to help find a donor. It would be the only one that produced results.

"It was just one of those things where all the stars lined up perfectly," Warshaw said. "The fact that Rachel was a match, that there were a lot of good things that made this possible."

White was a perfect match, but scheduling the surgery around family events, husbands' work schedules and MedStar's surgery rotation left June 13 as the earliest date.

When the Whites and Silvermans went to temple together the Friday before the surgery, Warshaw told them June 13 had religious significance.

There are 613 commandments from God in the Torah. 

The paired exchange was a success. White's kidney went to a recipient in Minnesota. Silverman received a kidney from a 25-year-old donor in Colorado.

Silverman will have to take anti-rejection drugs the rest of her life, drink 2-3 liters of water a day and be kept under the watchful eyes of her doctor.

"Thank goodness we lived to tell about it," Silverman said.

"I wracked my brain about what to get Rachel as a gift, because what do you get somebody that saves your life? You can't put a monetary value on it," Silverman said. 

"But I know how blessed I am. We will be bonded for life by this experience."

How to help

For a donor screening application, visit the MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute Living Donor site www.medstargeorgetown.org/LivingKidneyDonor.

"We're always open to anyone interested in pursuing this," said Verbesey. "We're always ready to talk to them and teach them about the process, and guide them through it if they decide to go forward."