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St. Francis
transplant patients
are ‘doing well’

Their families and the hospital
staff are ecstatic about the 'gifts'
that will extend people's lives

By Helen Altonn
Star-Bulletin

Mother's Day this year was unforgettable for Yolanda Domingo, 41, and her family.

After a two-year wait for a heart transplant, an organ donation was available for her Sunday.

Tony Sagayadoro, on the wait list nearly five years for a kidney, benefited from the same donor. He received a kidney transplant Monday.

"He just made 47 on May 11," his wife, Rina, said. "It's a gift for him."

Domingo was called at "the crack of dawn" Sunday and told of the heart donation, said Donna Pacheco, heart and liver transplant coordinator at St. Francis Medical Center.

"We were afraid she'd go out and eat a big brunch or something."

Although brunch was out, Domingo was surrounded by family for the long-awaited transplant on Mother's Day.

Her husband, Blaine, two of their three children, her mother, aunts and other relatives were present, Pacheco said.

She said Domingo was "doing great" yesterday in the intensive care unit.

Sagayadoro was informed Sunday afternoon that he had a kidney donor and a transplant was performed Monday morning, Pacheco said.

"The kidney worked immediately," she said.

"He is doing incredibly well.

"The whole transplant community ... everyone is ecstatic" about Sagayadoro's new kidney, she said.

"Everybody has been watching him and waiting for him to get this kidney for years."

As head of the Minority Transplant Tissue Education Program of Honolulu, Sagayadoro has spent years helping others get life-saving organ donations.

His organization has stressed the need for organ donors, especially from Hawaii's ethnic minority populations.

So when the list came up Sunday with his name on it for a kidney, Pacheco said, "We were so excited ... just thrilled. That's all I heard (Monday), phone calls and people jumping up and down."

She said he "looked great coming out of surgery" and immediately asked "how everybody else is doing. All he keeps thinking of is everybody else. That's who he is."

Pacheco said the transplant "will make Sagayadoro even more effective in his job" because he now has "moved through the whole process ... It is an incredible gift. That's why this is so powerful."

A Hawaiian woman received the donor's second kidney but didn't give permission to release her name, Pacheco said. The liver went to a mainland recipient.

Sagayadoro's family, including three children, was so happy Sunday after learning he would finally get a new kidney that they couldn't sleep, Rina Sagayadoro said.

"We are crying," she said, thanking the family that donated the organ, the nurses helping her husband and everyone calling her.

"Also thanks to the Lord. He is the one giving all this to us."