26 operations, 13 kidneys: new hope for many

WASHINGTON: Twenty-six operations put healthy kidneys into 13 desperately ill people: Doctors have just performed a record-setting kidney swap, part of a pioneering effort to expand transplants to patients who too often never qualify.

"A whole new doorway of hope opened," says Tom Otten, a suburban St. Louis police officer who traveled halfway across the country to Georgetown University Hospital to give a stranger a kidney so his wife would get one in return.

Relative after relative failed to be the match his wife, Irene, needed. Tests finally showed her body wouldn't tolerate a kidney from 95 percent of the population.