His father did everything he was told, Mitchell said.
Then just this week, Mitchell visited his Kaiser nephrologist in Sacramento. The kidney specialist told him that his father, 57, couldn't donate because the older man was taking blood pressure medications -- an objection that Mitchell said had never been raised before.
"If it turns out that he can't be a donor, it's a year wasted," Mitchell said. "I'm stuck on dialysis, unable to go to work. I'm on disability. My life has been on hold."
He said that his younger brother and an uncle are willing to be donors but that Kaiser has refused to test more than one person at a time.
After his experiences and news of the program's upheaval, he said: "I'm to the point now where I want to find out what my options are. I have no confidence in their transplant people. I don't want them touching me."
Burks' daughter, Leatha Sims, said she didn't mind the repetitive tests and screenings she had to undergo to be his living donor.
"Now," she said, "it looks like they were stalling."
Sims, 34, said she began questioning what was going on at Kaiser after she learned that transplant staffers were trying to convince her father that she didn't really want to donate a kidney to him, citing her move to Texas.
"My dad didn't even want my kidney, and that made me want to give it to him even more," she said. "They're trying to make him think I don't want to do this."
Like her father, Sims no longer wants the transplant performed at Kaiser. When a Kaiser representative called this week, she said, she told her: "I'm not doing it with you guys. We'll mortgage the house, and we'll just get it done elsewhere."
Celia Scull hasn't been fortunate enough to find a living donor. She's in the long line for a cadaver kidney.
What angers Scull, 60, is Kaiser's apparent indifference to the impact of dialysis on those awaiting kidneys. She took particular issue with the statement of a Kaiser physician executive this week that the program's chaotic start had not hurt patients.
"It isn't as if waiting another six months or nine months for a transplant is a death sentence," Dr. Sharon Levine had told The Times.
"If I could get my hands on her, I'd vivisect her," said Scull, who undergoes three-hour dialysis sessions three days a week.
Scull, a loyal Kaiser member for more than 25 years, is leery of entrusting her life to a program in such disarray.
