CASPER — Most people who say they’re living on borrowed time don’t mean it literally. Maybe they beat an addiction or caught that pending heart attack before it happened.
Anne Bina is literally living on borrowed time, and she knows just who she’s borrowed it from — a 16-year-old from Wisconsin named Ryan.
Bina had already lived more than half her life when she was counting down the days she had left with kidney failure in October 1999. Without a new donor organ, she’d die.
Fate brought Bina and Ryan together when the car Ryan was a front seat passenger in was rear-ended by a drunk driver in Wisconsin. It was a horrific crash that killed Ryan. It’s also the event that prompted the call to Bina, living in Missouri at the time — go to the hospital.
In her late 40s, the mother of two daughters had spent more than two months on dialysis when she got that phone call, one that fills a person with hope and happiness while at the same time feeling sorrow, because an organ becoming available means someone else had died.
Even nearly 25 years later, how she got her borrowed time from Ryan brings tears to her eyes.
“This is my donor family,” she told a group gathered at Casper’s Banner Wyoming Medical Center this past week, eyes welling up with tears. She held up a photo of Ryan with his Wisconsin parents.
That October day in 1999 was when Ryan’s life ended, and when Bina’s second life began. With Ryan’s kidney, she’s lived to see grandkids born, travel the country with her husband Bob, and explore retirement in Wyoming.
Now Bina uses some of that borrowed time to pay it forward and an for Donor Alliance, one of 56 organ procurement organizations in the U.S. that facilitate organ donation and transplantation. Donor Alliance services Colorado and most of Wyoming.
Wyoming Generosity
When it comes to organ donation, Wyoming is one of the most generous states in the nation, said Laura Jeffries, chief administrator for Donor Alliance.
“They surpass the average year over year,” she said.
Bina and Jeffries were at Banner Wyoming Medical Center in Casper last week to promote organ donation and share stories about the 307 organ donors in the alliance led to 918 lifesaving transplants in 2023.
Banner Wyoming Medical Center had five organ donors last year leading to 14 lives saved and so far in 2024, two donors and 10 lives saved, said Chief Medical Officer Dr. Steve Cobb.
“Out of tragedy comes this amazing lifesaving event,” Cobb said. “It’s not just lives, its tissue; 40 tissue donors in 2023 and 17 so far in 2024. Each tissue donation can heal up to 75 lives.”
An Internal Time Bomb
For Bina, who grew up in Wisconsin, her road to being a kidney transplant recipient began when she was 9 years old. She had a case of strep throat, and then a few weeks later developed nephritis, an inflammation of her kidneys.
Doctors told her parents that the inflammation could come back. But it didn’t right away, and she became active in sports, grew up and went to the University of Wisconsin, where she met her husband, who was a member of the Air Force ROTC.
“Upon graduation we got married and he became an officer in the Air Force, and for 25 years we moved around the country and even spent a year in South Korea,” she said. “We had two daughters, everything was fine.”
But she was living with an internal time bomb that had the potential to go off at any time if the nephritis were to return. And there were signs. Bina said she suffered migraine headaches from time to time, and in 1992 went to a doctor with a severe one. Her blood pressure was high. The doctor told her to come back the next day. It was high again.
“Then they started doing some testing and they discovered that my kidney function was at 50%,” she said.
Her kidneys were being scarred, and she was told she would need a transplant at some point.
In 1998, her husband retired from the Air Force and she was put on a transplant list. And then came the need for dialysis in August 1999.
“I hated dialysis. The thought of it today gives me goosebumps, but it kept me alive,” she said. “Then on Oct. 15, just about 2 1/2 months after I started dialysis, I got the call. Don’t ask me why that it is always in the middle of the night that you get this call — I got it at 2:30 in the morning.”
She was told to be at the hospital by 5:30 a.m. The kidney that had become available was a four out of six match for tissue, which is “incredible for a non-relative,” Bina said.
Young Donor
“I had a lot of time to pace and to worry and to cry, because I found out my donor was 16 years old,” she said. “And all I could think about is what that family was going through and why they chose donation.”
She spent a week in the hospital and after her release, got the address of the donor family.
“So, I wrote the letter and the mom, whose name was also Anne, wrote back right away and sent me the picture. She wanted to know all about me, and she told me all about Ryan and we have had a relationship since that day, about two months after my transplant,” she said. “And in 2021, we went back to Wisconsin, which is where this family was from, and I met them.”
During the meeting, she said she and Ryan’s mom just hugged.
“How do you say thank you to a family who have (experienced) this emotional rollercoaster, but now they are so thankful for you because you are alive and you are living life?” Bina said. “They had to meet me because they knew I was active in Donate Life and they knew I was taking care of Ryan’s kidney.”
Ryan’s mom was a nurse and told Bina she knew how important organ donation was, and following the crash that claimed their son they “knew right away this was something Ryan wanted to do.”
Enjoying ‘Normal’
Receiving the kidney gave Bina opportunities to see her daughters get married, to enjoy being a grandmother and other normal things retirees get to do.
“My husband and I have traveled, visiting friends, going to Europe, doing all the things a normal person does,” she said.
Bina said the amazing thing about organ donation is that “you never know whose life you are going to save.”
“I have a T-shirt from when we lived in Wisconsin and it says, ‘Don’t take your organs to heaven, heaven knows we need them here,’” she said. “There are so many people in need of organs today and Wyoming seems to get it.”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
