Two families celebrated giving each other the gift of health yesterday -- but it was a roller-coaster ride getting there.

At a news conference at Allegheny General Hospital, doctors introduced a Findlay couple and two Cambria County family members who swapped kidneys in a double transplant procedure Jan. 10.

Stanley Haduch, 57, a science teacher at Carrick High School, got a kidney from truck driver Earl Flynn, 55, of Portage. At the same time, Mr. Flynn's sister-in-law, Mary Benton, 48, of Sidman, got a kidney from Mr. Haduch's wife, Jeannine, a 48-year-old accountant.

All four patients are doing well now, but there was a time when it wasn't clear they would be able to pull off this paired exchange.

The surgeries were supposed to take place last July, Mr. Haduch said, but the night before the scheduled operations, doctors discovered he had heart problems. Instead of a kidney transplant, he underwent triple-bypass surgery.

Mr. Haduch then went on dialysis in August as he waited to recover enough so the kidney transplants could go forward.

But in December, Ms. Benton had to have surgery to remove an ovarian cyst. It turned out to be benign, but that delayed the final procedures until last month.

Doctors removed Mr. Flynn's left kidney through a small laparoscopic incision before implanting it in Mr. Haduch. They took out Mrs. Haduch's right kidney with a conventional incision and put it in Ms. Benton.

The immediate results were good, said AGH surgeon Ngoc Thai, but a week later, Ms. Benton developed a strong immune reaction against her new kidney.

It turned out she had high levels of antibodies against the new kidney, and in the space of a day, its urine output began to shut down, Dr. Thai said.

Doctors increased the immunosuppressive medication that all organ transplant recipients take, he said, but also tried newer therapies that had a miraculous result.

One of those treatments, plasmapheresis, took Ms. Benton's blood out of her body and separated the antibodies from her bloodstream before putting the rest of the cells back in. To his surprise, Dr. Thai said, doctors were able to remove all the offending antibodies, and her body now recognizes the new kidney as its own.

Paired exchanges are done when a potential recipient's relative or friend is willing to donate a kidney but is not a biological match for the person.

This was the second such procedure in the region. In December, doctors at UPMC Montefiore and Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia performed a paired kidney exchange between a Greenfield couple and sisters who lived in Lancaster, Pa., and Wheeling, W.Va.

Mr. Haduch said that when he and his wife met Ms. Benton and Mr. Flynn last year, "it was almost like we were seeing old friends for the second time. There was no strangeness or awkwardness."

They became so supportive that both Mr. Haduch and Ms. Benton told each other to take any matched kidney that might come along if one materialized before they could do the exchange.

Kidneys from living donors generally perform better than those from cadavers, and several studies have shown that living donors do not face any greater risk of future kidney problems than others do.

As for the trauma of the procedure, Mr. Haduch said, "When I came out of surgery, I felt like I was ready to go home. To be quite honest, I've had more painful dental surgery."