Kidney transplant patient: 'Pope blessed everybody'

In more than four years on the waiting list for a kidney, Deborah Husmann had eight phone calls about a possible organ match.

Each time, the kidney was a better fit for someone else, until - of all the weekends - Pope Francis was in town. And Husmann was close to an hour and a half away, camping in the middle of the Jersey Pinelands.

No matter. She made it by ambulance with an escort from New Jersey and Pennsylvania state police, and was in good spirits Sunday, the day after her four-hour operation at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

"Maybe the pope blessed everybody," said Husmann, 62, who is Catholic and lives in Berlin, Camden County.

Her husband, Chuck, 58, is not Catholic, but was happy to give credit.

"He blessed us, that's for sure," he said.

The two had parked their trailer at Wading Pines Camping Resort in Chatsworth on Friday, and were relaxing with cousins when the phone rang.

A kidney was available from a middle-age donor, and the organ was in pretty good shape. The Husmanns were interested, but there had been false alarms before.

By Saturday morning, further tests on the donor's tissue type confirmed that Husmann was the best match among a small pool of candidates. So that was it for the camping trip.

The couple drove back to their rental home in Berlin, where they have lived since losing their house in Little Egg Harbor, N.J., to Hurricane Sandy.

A JeffSTAT ambulance was waiting, along with a New Jersey state police cruiser and a flock of gawking neighbors. They met Pennsylvania state police at the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, using the clear emergency lane to pass throngs of pedestrians on the span, closed for the papal visit.

They had to slow down once they were in Philadelphia, but police and military personnel expertly directed hundreds of pedestrians out of the way, the Husmanns said.

"It only took them minutes," said Chuck Husmann, a nurse at Ancora Psychiatric Hospital in Winslow. "Everybody was fantastic."

The kidney came from a deceased donor, a woman from the area, surgeon Adam M. Frank said. He and Jerry McCauley, Jefferson's chief of nephrology, came by to check on Deborah Husmann on Sunday.

Jefferson does nearly 100 kidney transplants a year, Frank said.

The transplant business kept going this weekend at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania as well, with one operation Friday and three on Saturday, spokesman Steve Graff said. He said he could not give specifics due to patient privacy rules, but said they were all either liver or kidney transplants.

Husmann's transplanted kidney is not yet fully functional, so she remains on dialysis, possibly for a month or two. The organ was donated through the nonprofit Gift of Life, the region's organ-transplant network.

It was Husmann's second major surgery in as many years. Last year, she had a double bypass after a heart attack, and had to go off the kidney waiting list for six months.

Husmann used to work in casinos as a dealer and floor person until illness put her on disability. She suffered from focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, meaning her kidneys were scarred and couldn't function properly.

Sometimes, the disease recurs in transplant patients. But it came on slowly in Husmann, so her physicians hope for a good prognosis with the new kidney.

The transplant was covered by Medicare, and Chuck Husmann said his insurance will help cover the immune-suppressing drugs that his wife must take for the rest of her life to prevent organ rejection.

She is likely to remain in the hospital for at least a week. Plenty of time to reflect on an unusual journey.

"It was unbelievable," she said. "Let's put it that way."

tavril@phillynews.com

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