Loudoun Teacher Takes Part In Kidney Exchange With Former Student

LEESBURG, VA — A Loudoun County elementary school teacher has agreed to participate in a paired kidney exchange program that will allow one of her former students to receive a life-saving kidney transplant. As part of the kidney swap, Christie Kaplan will donate one of her kidneys to another person in need of a kidney, while Kaplan's former student, Lexie Ruff, will receive a compatible kidney from a different living donor.

Assuming all the participants can avoid getting sick and pass their final cross-match test, Lexie, who is now a ninth-grader at Loudoun County High School in Leesburg, will receive her new kidney at 3 p.m. on Tuesday at Johns Hopkins Hopsital in Baltimore and Kaplan will give her kidney to her recipient at 8:45 a.m. on Jan. 16 at Johns Hopkins.

Lexie suffered multiple organ failure and bleeding in the brain at birth. Her other organs eventually recovered, but her kidneys did not. She's been on and off dialysis her entire life, most recently in September.

In fourth grade, when Kaplan was Lexie's teacher at Frederick Douglass Elementary School in Leesburg, Lexie's health started to worsen after a transplanted kidney she had received from a deceased donor a few years earlier went into decline. Lexie's mother, Kimberly Ruff, and Kaplan were working at the same school at the time.

"Christie held me more than once while I broke down and cried" when Lexie started growing weak, Ruff wrote in a recent Facebook post.

Kaplan has regularly checked on Lexie over the past five years after she left her fourth-grade class. She has dropped off stuffed animals for Lexie when she has been hospitalized. And Kaplan raised more than $1,500 in Lexie's name for Inova Fairfax Children's Hospital by sponsoring a "penny war" charitable event at Hillside Elementary, a school in Ashburn where she now teaches second grade.

After Lexie underwent the transplant procedure from a deceased donor about 10 years ago, Ruff wrote a book, titled Brave Just Like Me, based on the life of a girl who has a medical condition that requires her to spend a lot of time in therapy, at hospitals, and in doctors' offices. Kaplan has been reading Ruff's book to her second-grade students as the date of the procedure gets closer to help them understand what she is doing and why she will be gone for a few weeks.

Kaplan is "an angel in human form," Ruff told Patch.

After a year's worth of testing to determine whether she could give Lexie a kidney, Kaplan was ruled out as a donor. A prospective donor must have several points of compatibility, including a compatible blood type, tissue type and other markers.

Kaplan, who has been a school teacher for 26 years, was undeterred. After Johns Hopkins contacted her, she signed up with the National Kidney Registry to be a living donor and entered the paired kidney exchange program on Lexie's behalf.

Kidneys from living donors tend to last longer than those from deceased donors, and recipients generally have better outcomes with living donation. About one-third of all kidney transplants performed in the U.S. are living-donor kidney transplants. The other two-thirds involve a kidney from a deceased donor.

A paired kidney exchange occurs when a living kidney donor, like Kaplan, is incompatible with a recipient, and decides to exchange a kidney with another donor and recipient pair. Under the exchange program, there are two donor and recipient pairs: donor and recipient 1 and donor and recipient 2, for example. Donor 1 gives a kidney to recipient 2. Donor 2 gives a kidney to recipient 1.

On Tuesday, under this scenario, Lexie will be receiving a kidney from donor 2 and nine days later, Kaplan will be giving a kidney to recipient 2. For privacy reasons, the doctors have not told Kaplan who will be receiving her kidney, although she knows it will be a pediatric patient.

Kaplan, who will be 51-years-old at the time of the procedure, spoke with her husband and grown children about her plans and they backed her decision. Kaplan said her children told her they were proud of her for agreeing to donate the kidney.

Kaplan appreciates the support of her family, although she said she isn't donating her kidney to win praise. "I just felt called to do it. I feel very honored and blessed to be able to help," she told Patch.

After spending two nights in the hospital following the removal of the kidney, Kaplan will get to go home. The doctors told her full recovery from the procedure should take about six weeks, although she will be allowed to return to teaching in three weeks. The procedure will be performed by Dr. Shane Erik Ottmann, director of the Living Donor Kidney Transplant Program at Johns Hopkins.

For Lexie, if everything goes as planned with Tuesday's transplant procedure, she should start feeling stronger on the third day after the transplant. Lexie will need to stay at Johns Hopkins Hospital for about two weeks. When she goes home for recovery, Lexie will be required to stay there for about a hundred days. At that point, she should be ready to go back to school, Ruff said.

"Words cannot possibly capture how grateful we are for this woman's courage and her unwavering commitment to help save our child's life," Ruff wrote in her Facebook post about Kaplan.

Removing a kidney is a major surgical procedure that has its share of risks. Once the kidney is removed, though, current research shows donors do not have higher risks of death, cardiovascular disease, diabetes or a lower quality of life.

Kaplan doesn't see the kidney donation as an act of bravery and isn't anxious about the upcoming procedure. "I'm not nervous at all," she said. "Really, no nerves."