Bethel Park resident donates kidney, meets recipient for first time
Erin Prindle, accompanied by husband Jason, greets Kurt Dehaven for the first time.
Erin Prindle gets a heartfelt hug from Kurt Dehaven.
Kurt Dehaven and Erin Prindle
Running a 50-kilometer race is beyond the grasp of many people.
After all, that adds up to 31 miles, which is a good bit more than a marathon.
Now, think about doing that with one kidney.
Bethel Park resident Erin Prindle is. She and a friend from the South Park Trail Runners are planning to participate in a 50k event in the summer, not all that far removed from Prindle’s donation of a major organ.
On Dec. 17, she underwent surgery at Allegheny General Hospital, with her kidney received by Kurt Dehaven of Baden, Beaver County, who had been on a waiting list for a transplant.
They didn’t know each other beforehand, but six weeks after their respective procedures, they had the opportunity to meet in person, as arranged at the hospital.
“He was so, so sweet and kind and appreciative,” Prindle said. “I just feel humbled and honored to have the gift of health to be able to do something like that for someone else.”
Early in 2021, she received an update about a co-worker’s wife who had undergone a kidney transplant.
“Unfortunately, it had failed. She wasn’t doing well,” Prindle recalled. “So I reached out to him, and I said, ‘Are you going to need other people to potentially donate to her?'”
On receiving a positive response, she reached out to a colleague.
“Send me the paperwork,” she told her colleague, “whatever I need to do to start checking to see if we can be a possible match.”
From February through June, she said she had her blood, heart rate, blood pressure and other anatomical considerations tested on a regular basis, “making sure I’m just, in general, in good health.”
Then she traveled to the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus for a day of further testing and conversations with a nephrologist, surgeons and social workers about what she should expect.
“We were a match up until that point,” she said about the co-worker’s wife. “I got to meet her that day, and it was just so sweet.”
Two weeks later, Prindle received a call informing her that a direct donation wasn’t going to work, after all.
“They asked, would I be interested in looking at the paired exchange program, where I would donate to someone else and then someone else would donate to my co-worker’s wife,” she recalled. “That was the plan. And while they were looking for a match, in July, they found her a deceased donor. So she received that, and she’s doing well.”
Meanwhile, Prindle decided to pursue with her donation, regardless. Through the National Kidney Registry, she learned one of its transplant centers was at Allegheny General Hospital.
“They were amazing: the coordinators, the surgeons, just everyone from the start. Super responsive, very professional compassionate, everything they should be,” she said. “My only stipulation to them was that I wanted it to be somebody local. I know they have the option of shipping it out to California or wherever, and I knew there was a small risk of something happening in that transition time.”
Following her procedure, she took three weeks off before returning to work, and she planned to resume running the weekend of Feb. 12, embarking on her path back toward covering 31 miles or more.
“I did a lot of research about that,” she said. “We have a friend locally who donated to his daughter and is very much into endurance events. So he was definitely a good resource.”
Also, she discovered a group called Kidney Donor Athletes, which promotes the gift of life through living kidney donation among active individuals and athletes.
“They have just been an amazing source of information and people who do all of these things, and much more distance than I would ever consider doing,” Prindle said.
Members of her family, including husband Jason and two teenage children, have provided encouragement.
“I would say they had a normal amount of concern, mostly from my husband and my parents,” Prindle said. “My daughter was a bit more vocal about it: ‘Mom, I just think that’s wonderful. You’re so brave.'”
As for her son, she said she gave him a wristband with “donate life” printed on it.
“I brought it home from the clinic. I didn’t say anything. I just set it with his stuff,” she said. “And he has had it one every single day since. It hasn’t come off. So I feel like that is his quiet support.”
According to the Living Kidney Donors Network, recipients experience numerous benefits when the organ comes from someone who is alive. For example, short- and long-term survival rates are significantly better for transplants from living donors than transplants from deceased donors.
Regarding Prindle’s course of action, Allegheny Health Network reports that nationally, fewer than 7% of living kidney donors give anonymously.
For more information, visit www.ahn.org/services/surgery/transplant/kidney-pancreas.