Daughter makes dad oldest organ recipient

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Karen Beckley gave a kidney to her dad and, in so doing, put him in the record book as the nation’s oldest recipient of an organ transplant from a living donor.

Harold Wendt, 84 years and 11 months at the time of the operation in March, now holds that distinction, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which began keeping records in 1988. The age of the previous record holder was 84 years and 2 months.

The median age for living donor recipients was 42 from 1994 to 2000.

The number of older recipients will probably rise because doctors now consider health more important than age in evaluating transplant candidates, said Dr. R. Brian Stevens, who operated on Wendt at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

Beckley, 57, lives in Savannah, Ga. She said that at a Christmas visit to Lincoln more than a year before the surgery, she noticed her father was physically and emotionally tired. He had endured dialysis three times a week since 2000, shortly after his kidneys failed because of hypertension.

Beckley, Wendt’s only biological child, had to undergo blood work and other tests to ensure compatibility, as well as prove she was healthy - physically and psychologically - before the transplant was approved.

Within four weeks after the surgery Beckley was back at work as a pediatric speech and language pathologist.

Since the operation, father and daughter are closer. They call each other almost every day instead of once a week.

“We just touch base more often now,” Beckley said. “He’s teasingly said he’ll always have me as part of him.”

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