GARDEN CITY — Alex Koehne had a love for life, and always wanted to help people. So when his parents were told that their 15-year-old son was dying of bacterial meningitis, the couple didn’t hesitate in donating his organs to desperately ill transplant recipients. “I immediately said, ‘Let’s do it’,” Jim Koehne recalled. “We both thought it was a great idea. This is who Alex was.” A year later, their dream that Alex’s spirit might somehow live on has become a nightmare. It turned out that Alex did not die of bacterial meningitis, but rather a rare form of lymphoma that wasn’t found until his autopsy, and apparently spread to the organ recipients. The Long Island couple was told that two of the recipients have died, and two others had the donor kidneys removed and are getting cancer treatment. The revelation has led two hospitals to revise transplant procedures, although the state Health Department found that no one was to blame. Experts say the possibility of getting cancer from an organ donor is extremely rare: Only 64 cases have been identified in a national study of 230,000 cases, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. “A 15-year-old boy’s organs are a gift from the Almighty,” said transplant surgeon Lewis Teperman, noting the majority of organ donors are much older than Alex. “Usually the organs from a 15-yearold are perfect. In this case, they weren’t.” Teperman is the director of transplantation at New York University Medical Center, where two of the transplants were done and lead author of a report on the case. Last March, Alex was taken to Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island after treatment at another hospital for nausea, vomiting, severe back and neck pain, seizures and double vision. Doctors told his parents they suspected he had bacterial meningitis — an infection of the fluid surrounding the spinal cord and brain — although tests didn’t reveal what bacteria caused it. He was treated with antibiotics but died on March 30. The Koehnes requested an autopsy. They were told a month later that Alex had actually died from a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a blood cancer that affects fewer than 1,500 patients in the U.S. annually. “Our jaws dropped,” Jim Koehne recalled. “We walked out of there crying.” Jim and Lisa Koehne (pronounced KAY-na) later learned that a 52-year-old man died of the same rare lymphoma about four months after receiving Alex’s liver. The couple said they were also told a 36-year-old woman who received Alex’s pancreas also developed lymphoma and died. Two patients who received the kidneys are undergoing cancer treatment and are faring well, according to the report in the January issue of the American Journal of Transplantation. All four recipients were notifi ed immediately of the autopsy results and got chemotherapy, the report said. None have been publicly identified. The transplants were done at Stony Brook, NYU Medical Center and the University of Minnesota.
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