US doctors perform kidney transplant on awake patient in landmark – National

A medical team in the United States performed a rare kidney transplant in which the patient was awake for the entire procedure and was discharged the next day.

John Nicholas, of Indianapolis, underwent the awake transplant last month at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. His childhood friend Patrick Wise, whom he has known since elementary school, was the living donor.

Instead of using general anesthesia, which requires the patient to be intubated, doctors used a spinal epidural injection, a regional anesthesia also used during a cesarean section or a routine colonoscopy.

Nicholas told Global News it was “pretty amazing” to see his friend’s kidney before it was inserted.

“They showed me the kidney before they put it in. I don’t think anyone has ever had this experience before.”

The doctors even asked what kind of music he would like to listen to during the procedure. Nicholas chose The Killers, one of his favorite bands.

“At first I actually sang along to that,” he said, smiling.

With a blindfold around his neck, Nicholas, who was quite drowsy due to a mild sedative, could not see the operation in real time, but he could still hear the surgeons as they communicated with him step by step. step how the transplant went. The operation took less than two hours.

“I didn’t experience any pain,” Nicholas said. “During the operation I had no feeling at all.

“The biggest part of my experience during the surgery was hearing the surgeon shout that various milestones had happened during the surgery.”

This is not the first awake kidney transplant performed in the US

Satish Nadig, chief of transplant surgery at Northwestern Medicine, who performed the surgery, said Nicholas did not require opioid narcotic painkillers and was able to go home with a functioning kidney within 24 hours of the procedure.

Because he was in constant contact with the transplant team, Nicholas was “a participant in the operation and not just a bystander in his own health care,” Nadig told Global News in an interview.

He said this “paradigm-shifting” procedure could pave the way for transplant access for patients at high risk of needing general anesthesia, while also shortening the length of hospital stay for a transplant patient.

“At Northwestern we thought we could turn a major surgery into an overnight procedure,” he said.

“Now that John has broken the ceiling, we can offer it to patients who have lung disease, or are older or have heart disease that may put them at higher risk for general anesthesia, to make recovery much safer for them,” Nadig said.

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Nicolas was first diagnosed with chronic kidney disease during high school in 2013. After moving to Chicago in 2022, his kidney function had deteriorated and doctors at Northwestern told him he needed a transplant.

The Northwestern team chose him as a candidate for the awake transplant because he was young and otherwise healthy and willing to go through with it.

“We tried to make a good operation, a kidney transplant that is traditionally done is a good operation, better – and he agreed,” Nadig said.

A month after the transplant, Nicholas said his recovery has gone “extremely well.”

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