Hospital Tailors Kidney Transplant To Protect Teen Baseball Player’s Swing–Putting It On Other Side Of His Body

Hospital Tailors Kidney Transplant To Protect Teen Baseball Player’s Swing–Putting It On Other Side Of His Body

It was a parent’s worst nightmare, but doctors showed extra compassion for the patient who had dreams of being a baseball player when he grows up.

Five-year-old Sam Heintz was in the intensive care unit of Michigan’s Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital with failing kidneys and a grim diagnosis. He had a rare life-threatening disease (atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome) that produces blood clots in the kidney that can eventually lead to organ failure.

The little kid who loved baseball would need a kidney transplant if he ever hoped to play again. Fortunately, the next bounce of life fell in Sam’s favor when, at eight years old, the hospital located an organ donor.

Sam was a getting a new kidney. But the baseball player was a left-handed batter—so the family made a special request.

Typically, kidneys are transplanted into the lower right side of the body, which means every time Sam stepped into the batter’s box, the kidney would be directly exposed and vulnerable if a pitcher he were facing threw an errant fastball.

“When this is all done, can he still play baseball? If that’s gone, then our life is going to drastically change,” Sam’s mom told their provider, Corewell Health.

Could they place his kidney on the left side so it would be safer on the baseball diamond?

“They said that’s never been a request before,” Sam’s mother Alicia told WZZM-13, a TV news crew in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Luckily for the lefty, they were happy to do it. “They were happy to make it happen.”

“It was super cool,” Sam said. “I’m a lefty, and when I’m up to bat it’s pretty vulnerable if I turn and foul one off, or get hit there.”

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“It makes sense, right?” Cristina Brini, a a physician assistant in pediatric nephrology at DeVos Hospital, said in the article. “If you’re left-handed and you have the bat up, you don’t want to be exposed to where all of these balls are coming at you at 100 miles per hour.”

Sam has now returned to the baseball field, and in an interesting twist of fate, the wife of the boy’s coach was his nurse as a child—so the story has come full circle.

Although the early innings of his life didn’t go the way Sam—or his parents—had planned, his medical team and a new kidney have helped him make a valiant comeback.

And you can be sure that baseball will continue to be a big part of it.

WATCH the TV-13 video below…