Sixty years ago, in an operating theatre at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, two South Australians made medical history.
On 21 February 1965, 33-year-old Pasquale (Peter) Tirimacco became the first person in Australia to receive a live kidney transplant.
Domenic Centofanti, left, with Peter and Stella Tirimacco, and their children Gina, Enrico and Nora.
Just a few months earlier, both of his kidneys were removed after a battle with kidney disease.
Without many options, the future looked grim.
But there was one: an emerging procedure which involved the removal of a kidney from a healthy donor and transplanted into the recipient.
Despite successful surgeries in America and the United Kingdom in the decade prior, it had yet to be attempted in Australia.
Once the prospect of the surgery was raised, there came a new challenge to find a suitable donor.
Pasquale’s wife Stella volunteered, as did his two brothers and sister-in-law, but it was ultimately his father-in-law, Domenic Centofanti, who proved to be a match.
The marathon double-surgery, led by Professor Jim Lawrence and surgeon Peter Knight, took most of the day to complete, with immunosuppression drugs helping prevent the organ from being rejected.
Pasquale was given a new life through the surgery, allowing him to return to work and watch his family grow up.
The donor kidney worked for 11 years before failing, with Pasquale placed on renal dialysis for another decade.
‘It gave us an extra 20 years with our father’
Just five years old at the time, Pasquale’s son Enrico said he doesn’t remember much about the actual event.
But along with his two sisters, Gina and Nora, they were thankful that they got to wake up every day with their dad still in their lives.
“He was there when I got married, he was there when my sister got married and managed to walk her down the aisle. He got a couple of grandkids as well,” he said.
“Every day you think these are things that we never would have experienced if it didn’t happen the way it did.”
The procedure was partially funded by The Hospital Research Foundation Group (then known as The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Research Foundation), which has continued to fund kidney disease research for 60 years.
Since Pasquale went under the knife all those years ago, tens of thousands of Australians have followed suit.
In South Australia alone, more than 3,400 kidney transplants have been successfully performed across the QEH and Royal Adelaide Hospital.
And it all started with one brave family from Adelaide’s north east.
“You can never repay someone when they give you 20 years of your life, there’s no money that can repay that,” Enrico said.
“But at least if you can make it easier for the people that come after you to get the same thing, Dad was of that mentality.
“He would be so proud that he and the people around him could that and it meant changing lives for the better for so many people.”
