A Bronx man finally got a new kidney yesterday — five months after his beloved sister died on an operating table trying to donate hers.
“This is the gift of life that I was supposed to get back on May 23,” dad of four Roberto Medina, 39, told The Post before receiving a kidney donated by a cousin at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
“I know she has something to do with all of this,” Medina said of his late sister Yolanda. “She’s my angel.”
Their cousin, Joe Martinez, 31, said he stepped up to donate his kidney because, “I kept thinking of what Yolanda did — and I just wanted to finish what she started.”
Yolanda, a 41-year-old mom of three, bled to death at Montefiore Hospital in The Bronx May 23 after her aorta was accidentally cut during harvesting surgery. Her kidney could not then be used.
Her death — the first ever in Montefiore’s four-decade live-donor program — spurred it to suspend the program and reach quick, confidential monetary settlements with Yolanda’s family and Roberto.
But its efforts to fast-track a transplant from a deceased donor were nixed by a national oversight authority.
Medina was then left in a grim limbo.
He had to undergo several dialysis sessions, each lasting up to four hours, every week.
And he faced the awful possibility that, without a transplant, he’d die of kidney failure in one or two years.
“This has been our biggest nightmare,” Medina said.
Medina, an accountant, “got the chills” when Martinez called him in August, and made his amazingly generous offer. “It was very touching,” he said.
Martinez, a Massachusetts construction worker, said he told his three kids, “‘I have to save my cousin’s life and give him my kidney.’” My daughter was saying, ‘That’s so sweet.’”
Yesterday morning, — after weeks of tests to confirm Martinez’s suitability as a donor — a large group of relatives nervously waited at Weill Cornell as his kidney was harvested and transplanted into Medina.
“Everything went fantastic . . . really routine, just the way we like,” said transplant surgeon Dr. Sandip “Sandy” Kapur, noting that Medina’s new kidney immediately began working.
Medina’s elated wife, Marybel, said her husband was “doing excellent” after the surgery — and that he and their family is “very relieved that this chapter is finally coming to a close.”
Martinez, who saw Medina right after the surgery, said, “I was happy to be alive, happy to wake up” and see his wife, Jennette. “I’m happy, he’s happy — our whole family is right now.”