LYNNFIELD — After more than a year, Marianne Supino got the call she’d been anxiously awaiting from her doctor.
The 61-year-old Lynnfield resident, who needs a kidney for a second time, was told a donor has come forward.
“I still have lots of hoops to go through, but I’m much closer to a miracle than ever before,” she said. “It’s absolutely delightful.”
The donor is Tina Morris, a Lynn native who operates the Lynnfield Children’s Center just five miles from Supino’s home. It turns out Morris knows Supino’s husband, who had coached her son’s baseball team.
While Morris and Supino were not a match for the transplant, it’s still good news. Under the National Kidney Exchange Peer Program, Morris will donate her kidney to a stranger in July. As a result it expands Supino’s donor list.
“Because Tina is so generous and willing to donate a kidney to a stranger, it puts me into this life-saving peer exchange program,” Supino said.
Morris, who saw the posting seeking a kidney on Facebook, said she decided to donate as her 50th birthday approached.
“I asked myself, what’s my next step, how do I want to be remembered?” she said. “This is my way of giving back.”
It could be argued Morris has already given back. Since 2014 more than seven dozen children have come through the doors of her day care center. The Salem Street school consistently gets top ratings from parents on social media. This one, posted by Meghan T on care.com, is typical.
“I can’t say enough about this amazing day care that my son called ‘school’ for more than three years,” she wrote. “The staff are loving, attentive, energetic and get to know the kids really well from day one. The rooms are clean, bright, fun and well-organized. They follow a routine, yet allow for plenty of free and outdoor time. The teachers took such great care of my son and I couldn’t thank them enough. The director was always willing to work with our crazy schedule, appreciated my son’s unique personality, and made the whole experience a joy …”
But Morris said she wants to do more and told her adult children.
“My 20-year-old son said, ‘Of course you’re doing this, mom, her son needs a mother too,'” she said. “That was the best response ever. He saw it from both families’ perspective.”
Supino is one of more than 100,00 people in the U.S. on the waiting list for a donor kidney, according to the National Kidney Foundation, a New York City nonprofit whose mission is dedicated to the awareness, prevention and treatment of kidney disease.
More than 3,000 new patients are added to the list monthly. The median wait time for a kidney transplant is about four years. In 2014, the most recent data available, 17,107 kidney transplants took place in the U.S. Of these, 11,570 came from deceased donors and 5,537 came from living donors. That year, nearly 5,000 patients died while waiting for a kidney transplant while another 3,668 people became too sick to receive the transplant.
Morris was not the only person who came forward to donate a kidney.
William Rothwell, a Maplewood Road resident, was also willing to provide a kidney, but was disqualified by doctors at the last minute for a medical reason.
“Initially anonymous to me, Bill and his wife, Denise, are now great friends,” she said. “They continue to support my journey.”
And last fall, a Lynnfield Weekly News reader saw the story about Supino’s plea for a kidney and contacted the paper. Unfortunately, the North Shore man was too old to donate.
This is not the first time Supino will get a kidney transplant. At age 23, she underwent the surgery transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital and life was good, she said, for 30 years.
But that changed in 2012 when at her summer home in Maine, she couldn’t walk a straight line or swallow pills.
She was rushed to the ER at a hospital in York. A CT scan revealed she had multiple tumors. Emergency brain surgery was performed at MGH and she spent 45 days at the Yawkey Center for Cancer Care.
While the surgery and a combination of chemotherapy and radiation removed the tumors, making her cancer-free, the one drawback was she had to stop taking the drugs to keep her transplanted kidney in top shape, she said.
Within eight months, Supino was on dialysis. The time-consuming process removes waste, salt and extra water to prevent a build-up in the body and keeps a safe level of certain chemicals in the blood, such as potassium, sodium and bicarbonate. She is at a Wakefield clinic four times a week for about three hours each day.
Now she’s been cleared for a second transplant and is expected to have a new kidney sometime this year.
“The next steps are complicated and long,” she said “But I have a motto: just live every day because if not, you’ll look back and ask what happened to your life,” Supino said.
