A wife’s life-saving Valentine’s Day gift

After 36 years of marriage, Yolanda Bobadilla was out of conventional Valentine’s Day gift ideas for her husband, David. Fortunately, she was able to give him an outside-the-box present that he happened to need desperately — a kidney that would spare him the life-altering challenge of dialysis.

A slow-developing condition

David had known for decades that he would likely face problems with his kidneys. When he was 25, he had urine testing done while purchasing an insurance policy that revealed unusually high protein levels. Ten years later, another test revealed that his kidneys were starting to lose effectiveness.

Still, his kidney issues weren’t impacting his daily life. David was fit, which comes with working ten hours a day as a mail carrier. However, after a while, Yolanda could see that David’s health was slipping.

“I noticed he was starting to tire more easily,” Yolanda remembers. “We love to travel, but he couldn’t walk as far.”

The path toward a transplant

By the time David reached his early 50s, his doctors diagnosed him with a form of chronic kidney disease called idiopathic membranous glomerulonephritis. The illness causes the small filters in the kidneys that remove waste products from the blood to thicken and become damaged, which can ultimately lead to kidney failure.

“Around 1 in 7 Americans have some form of kidney disease,” says Dr. Arman Faravardeh, medical director at the Sharp Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Center, located at Sharp Memorial Hospital. “Most people won’t even know they have it because, typically, there are no symptoms from early-stage kidney disease.”

David learned that his kidney function had decreased to the point that he would soon need to begin dialysis, in which a machine acts as an artificial kidney to filter blood. Dialysis has a significant impact on a patient’s life because it needs to be done several days per week and takes 3 to 5 hours per session.

Doctors told David that receiving a kidney transplant would restore him to his normal activities without the need for dialysis. However, the wait for an available kidney could be a long one. Of the more than 103,000 Americans on the organ waitlist, almost 90,000 of them need a kidney.

“We just have so many people with kidney disease and kidney failure and not enough organs,” says Dr. Faravardeh. “It’s a big mismatch between the demand and the supply.”

David would be able to avoid the waitlist if he could find a willing donor. He could ask family and friends to be tested to see if they were compatible. Even if a willing donor was not compatible with David, Sharp HealthCare participates in a paired exchange program, which allows a donor’s kidney to be “swapped” for one that would be compatible with David.

A Valentine’s gift unlike any other

Fortunately for David, it turned out he didn’t need a swap.

“I never thought I would be a perfect match as a donor, but I was,” Yolanda says. “I was so excited, but David wasn’t quite so sure. He said, ‘If your kidney goes into me, will I turn grumpy like you?’”

On February 12, two days before Valentine’s Day, the Bobadilla’s arrived at Sharp Memorial for the transplant surgery. Yolanda’s kidney was removed in a procedure performed by Dr. Marquis Hart, a transplant surgeon with Sharp Community Medical Group who has been at the forefront of the use of robotic-assisted surgical technology. Robotic surgery improves patient outcomes by lessening pain and shortening recovery times.

Dr. Hart then handed off the kidney to Dr. Jeffrey Halldorson, also a Sharp Community Medical Group transplant surgeon, who took it into the operating room next door to perform David’s transplant procedure.

Just a few hours later, the couple got to see each other. Yolanda could tell the impact of the transplant was immediate.

“I could see just from looking at his face that he was feeling better,” she remembers. “It made the whole thing worth it to see the difference right away.”

Yolanda says she felt a little pain, which was expected for the first few days of her recovery, but that subsided as she began to move around. She went home the day after the surgery. Her husband joined her a day later.

“He can walk straight now,” Yolanda reports. “He used to be hunched over and complain about back pain and being tired. He feels so good, he even says he wants to go back to work earlier than we had planned.”

Instead of facing a future dictated by the need for dialysis, the Bobadillas are planning a future based around what they want to do, including playing with their two grandchildren and returning to travel. First up — a long-put-off trip to Amsterdam.

“It gave us another start in life,” Yolanda says of the successful transplant.

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