Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital employee provides miracle living-donor kidney transplant

In January 2019, Bob Lafogg of Westfield, Mass., was diagnosed with stage 5 kidney disease. Over the next two-plus years, he endured failed attempts to find a kidney donor while undergoing dialysis treatments.

Then, in 2021, Melissa Dogonniuck, a project manager at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, decided to see if she was a potential donor match for Lafogg, who is married to one of Dogonniuck’s cousins.

“Even though I live in Pennsylvania—quite a distance from where Bob lives in Massachusetts, I felt this need to see if I was a match,” said Dogonniuck. “By my faith I went forward with it and found out we were a perfect match.”

Dogonniuck was indeed a transplant match for Lafogg, and surgery was scheduled in October 2021 for Dogonniuck to donate her right kidney. During the transplant operation, a rather miraculous discovery was made.

Soon after the surgery began, it was discovered that Dogonniuck was an even more perfect match for Lafogg than their initial blood tests indicated. The surgeons realized that Dogonniuck had been born with twice the normal number of veins, arteries and ureters going into the kidney she was offering for donation.

Then, an hour later, when surgeons were preparing Lafogg for the procedure, they discovered that due to an undeclared hernia operation years prior, those unexpected extra vessels turned out to be exactly what was required for surgeons to route the extra vessels around the discovered scar tissue. The transplant procedure was then successfully performed.

After three years of a progressive decline in his health, while receiving 4-hour dialysis treatments 3 to 4 days a week, Lafogg is now healthy and returned to work only four months post-operation. He is now looking forward to 25 more years of health and freedom from a machine as a result of this living organ donation.

“As his living donor, it’s so exciting for me to see Bob move on with his life and be there for his kids and his grandkids as they grow older,” said Dogonniuck. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to give the gift of life and for all the support and encouragement my Mercy Fitzgerald colleagues provided along the way.”

Nationally, there are more than 100,000 people waiting for an organ transplant. Every ten minutes, another person is added to the list, and on average, 20 people die each day in the United States because the need for organs far exceeds the current number of available life-saving gifts.

Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic is committed to helping raise awareness of the importance of organ and tissue donation.