Submitted by S. Lisiak, Sep 24, 2007 20:08

After over a year being worked up at our local transplant center with several living donor family members going through rigorous screening for a "new" protocol, we were told that my daughter's living donor transplant was indefinitely put on hold because of a shortage of the plasma based drug used in the protocol. After writing news agencies, congressman and anyone else we could think of, we personally started a search of facilities with other desensitization protocols. Months later we were told by the insurance company that Cedars Sinai and Johns Hopkins were not "in network" but they did find two other centers that were in network and doing the desensitization and within a week we flew up for an evaluation and within a month (October of 2006) the living donor transplant took place. My daughter needed post transplant plasmapheresis and IVIG but so far everything has been going well as we near the one year anniversary. Believe it or not, the Referral Network for United Health Care did a lot of the work after we were literally "dropped" by our local Lifelink office and told dialysis was the next step.

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