'No words' for pal's kidney donation

This time last year, Roger Ferrara of Queens was measuring his life not in the decades that lay ahead, but in the few years he had left.

On dialysis, the retired postal worker, 53, was certain he would die waiting for a kidney. Medicine's enduring mismatch between the number of kidneys available for transplant and the number of people in need had worsened in the past year.

Yet 30 miles away in Seaford, Thomas Lambert was wondering how his childhood friend was faring. They hadn't seen each other in a quarter-century, and Lambert, 52, was determined to reconnect with his pal. An Internet search he undertook would do much more.

Not only did he rekindle their friendship, but through a kidney donation gave him the ultimate gift: a chance for renewed life.

"There are no words for this kind of a gift," Ferrara said, still stunned how good luck and good friendship can miraculously coalesce to outwit fate.

The two friends, on the mend since their Nov. 18 surgeries, reunited last weekend for the first time since leaving NewYork-Presbyterian / Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan.

Their meeting was a time to celebrate, recall the past and ponder with deeper understanding the season's themes of giving and receiving.

"We were very close when we were 12, 13 years old, just before high school," said Lambert, co-owner of an Irish food company. As kids growing up 40 years ago in Glendale, Queens, he said the pair loved hockey and baseball.

"I wound up getting married and moved out here to Long Island," said Lambert, whose wife, Debbie, also grew up in Glendale. They raised three children and lost touch with old friends.

Lambert's Internet search in the spring revealed Ferrara hadn't moved far from their childhood neighborhood.

"When I called him, I said, 'Hey, Rog, this is Tommy,' " Lambert recalled, noting that when he heard his friend's voice, suddenly, it was 1970, not 2010.

Yet when the two met at a barbecue this summer and Ferrara told Lambert about his plight, their sunny recollections soon turned to the dim realities of kidney failure and dwindling days.

"I thought maybe there was a possibility I could help him out," Lambert said. "I said, 'Hey, what's your blood type?' He said, 'O.' I said, 'I'm an O, too.' "

Ferrara said, "I thought about it and said, 'No. He's got a wife. He's got kids.' But when he said, 'I'm serious and I want to do it before the holidays, I really had to think about it."

From infancy, Ferrara had been bothered by a kidney cyst. That, and later hypertension, conspired to steal his organs' function. He had been on dialysis since February 2009. Kidney failure forced him to retire, sapped his strength and limited his life. Lambert's offer was a chance to reverse the inevitable.

Dr. Sandip Kapur, chief of transplant surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian, said medical advances have made living donations a route to renewed life for those too low on the list for a cadaver kidney. Kapur said in the past year, there were only 2,000 kidneys available for transplant, while the number of people awaiting the organs had grown to more than 200,000.

After the operation, Ferrara said he felt young again. Lambert reported fatigue, but now says he feels 99 percent better.

Kapur estimates the transplant added at least a quarter-century to Ferrara's life.

Their celebratory dinner was a toast to friendship. Many more years, they said, lie ahead.