How OSU Wexner saved 10 kidney patients in two days.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Twenty people had their lives changed forever as doctors at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center performed 20 surgeries over two days, saving the lives of 10 organ recipients.

According to the hospital, five donor and five recipient surgeries were performed each day, taking 10 healthy kidneys from 10 donors and transplanting them to 10 recipients.

“This is one of the country’s largest single-institution living kidney donor transplant chains completed in one week,” said Kenneth Washburn, MD, executive director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center and director of the Division of Transplantation Surgery at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, in a university statement. “Big chains like this one allow us to help a large number of patients in a short period of time.”

The donation chains happens when a person needing a kidney has a living donor who is not compatible blood or tissue match. The transplant team links the incompatible donor/recipient pair with other donor/recipient pair so that each recipient receives a compatible kidney.

The transplant swap begins with an altruistic non-directed donor while the final recipient is a person on the transplant waitlist.

Planning for the chain started in October. Once the living donors and recipients were identified, coordinators worked to keep the chain intact, with so much as a simple cold or fever could have broken the chain, the university said.

According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, there are 104,840 people on the transplant waitlist, 90,506 need a kidney, and 2,079 live in Ohio.