Surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital teamed up for a medical first over the weekend -- the nation's first multi-center, six-way kidney transplant.

TV station WBAL in Baltimore reported that the process involved one kidney being flown from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, one from Oklahoma City to St. Louis and one from St. Louis to Baltimore.

The complex swap orchestrated by Dr. Robert Montgomery involved 12 patients at three different hospitals, nine surgeons and a team of nearly 100 people.

They were all working to solve a common problem in the transplant world -- people in need of an organ who have a loved one willing to donate but don't match.

Some of the donors said that the desperation of the situation bonded them together, all of them strangers until the need for a kidney or the desire to donate one, brought them together.

"It's nice to know that part of you is giving someone else a chance to live. It's like a rebirth," donor Sharon Solof said.

"Essentially, what we do is mix and match and find an organ from a pool of people who have that problem. It's just like a line of dominos. If they don't all tumble, the ones at the end are left standing," Montgomery said.

The doctor found five pairs of people, each consisting of someone in need of a kidney and a relative who wanted to donate, but was incompatible.

Montgomery realigned the pairs to find a match for four of the recipients. An altruistic stranger donated a fifth kidney and a sixth recipient was picked off the national waiting list.

Recipient Al Finke was that last piece of the puzzle. He met his donor three days after the operation.

"I was happy to see he looks so well," Solof said.

Doctors timed the operations precisely to make sure that the three kidneys that had to be flown across the country would arrive on time.

Less than a week after the Valentine's Day swap, doctors said all of the recipients were healing well and most of the donors are out of the hospital.

Montgomery said he believes that if more of these multi-patient procedures are done, it could lead to an additional 1,500 transplants every year.

The challenge is that there is currently no national database of living donors, so it's up to hospitals to do the leg work and match participants.