VANCOUVER - Don Hogan would have done it anyway, but he says a pioneering program that paid his expenses to give his sister a kidney was a big relief.
One year after it was launched, officials say actions like Hogan's were what they hoped for when British Columbia took a leap and decided to start covering the costs associated with live organ donation. The move was designed to extend more support for existing donors and encourage others to come forward.
Though it's impossible to gauge whether that's been the case, of the 122 people who donated an organ in the last year, 101 kidney and partial liver donors used the program since it began in July 2006. During the same period the year before, there had been 98 live donor transplants.
"I think it's been a tremendous success," said Lorraine Gerard, the executive director of the B.C. branch of the Kidney Foundation, which administers the program in conjunction with the B.C. Transplant Society.
"We, as a foundation, are absolutely delighted to be able to support living organ donors."
It was the first program of its kind in Canada and others are following suit; the Ontario Liberal government announced on Friday that if re-elected they'd launch a similar system.
Donors in British Columbia are reimbursed up to $5,500 for transportation, travel and expenses like meals and parking, with a set limit on each category. They can also be compensated for loss of income if all other sources of funding, like holiday time, short -term disability insurance or other coverage plans have been exhausted.
Though Hogan used a combination of sick time and vacation to cover the month he's been off work since giving his sister a kidney in July, the travel costs were cumbersome. He and his wife needed to get from St. John's to Vancouver for the surgery.
He was surprised when he heard his costs would be covered.
"That was a relief to me," Hogan, 53, said.
"I'm not a poor man, but I'm not a rich man either."
For his wife, the Hogans used frequent flyer miles since they didn't meet the needs-based test for the program to pick up a second ticket.
In the last year, donors have come from as far away as Portugal, Laos and Malaysia.
But despite the distance, costs aren't as high as the Kidney Foundation had been expecting - they've only paid out $85,000 of the $300,000 in funding allocated for each year of the three-year pilot program. Half of the money comes from the government, the other half from corporate sponsorship.
Gerard said that's partially because more people were eligible for medical unemployment benefits or other insurance coverage than anticipated, and many of the donors lived close to transplant hospitals.
"It's too early to say we over-projected," she said. "The next 101 donors could all be international travellers."
Over the next two years, Gerard said she expects the program to expand.
"We believe that at the end of three years we'll be able to make a very powerful case," Gerard said. "This is the number of people who are no longer costing the province of B.C. $60,000 a year for dialysis."
Post -transplant medications cost only $6,000 a year.
"It makes fiscal sense if we've been able to help this amount of people for this amount of money," Gerard said.
Hogan, who works as an economist for the federal government, said to him, the program makes does make sense.
Twenty-five years ago, when his brother donated a kidney to their sister, he lost eight weeks of work. As a skilled tradesmen, he also lost all his salary as well.
"A lot of people aren't as well off as I am," he said. "They might have to think twice."
A landmark for the program was when it accepted it's first anonymous living donor -- a person who is happy to give an organ to a complete stranger. It's a controversial subject, but B.C. decided in 2004 to allow anonymous donations if the person would agree to psychological screening and a three-month waiting period before surgery.
It was part of a broader trend by transplant agencies over the last few years to lobby for different ways of approaching organ donation besides using deceased donors. Donation rates are nowhere near the level of demand and using living donors takes people off the extraordinarily long waiting list for an organ from a deceased donor. For an adult kidney, it can be as long as eight years.
For Dianne Summers, Hogan's sister, waiting that long wasn't an option. She'd been living with a transplanted kidney from a deceased person for 20 years, after the one their other brother gave her was rejected. Suffering from diabetes and other health issues, that kidney had begun to fail.
It was hard, Summers said, to ask Hogan for his kidney. She still wasn't over the emotional trauma of having her other brother's organ rejected by her body. After her doctor told her either she needed to ask, or he'd do it for her, she summoned the courage to make the call to St. John's.
It took two years to get the medical clearance necessary before the transplant could happen.
Hogan has an identical twin, and Summers jokes that now she's part of a triplet.
"Their gift to me was the best thing that ever happened."
