Talk about a miracle birth! In a breakthrough surgery, transplant surgeons at Johns Hopkins University removed a healthy kidney from a 48-year-old Maryland woman through her vagina so she could donate it to her ailing niece. Both the donor and recipient are doing well.

The surgical technique isn’t new. Transvaginal kidney removal, which involves making a few incisions at the back of the patient’s vagina, has been used to remove cancerous kidneys or lesions. But it had never been tried on a healthy kidney. Now doctors hope that using the technique for transplants will increase the number of donors, since using a natural opening in the body to remove the organ is less invasive and allows for a faster recuperation.

"If you asked our patient, she said it was like getting a tooth removed. She was walking that night and left the next day," said Dr. Robert Montgomery,  chief of transplant surgery at Hopkins. In the procedure, doctors, while guided by mini-cameras wrap the kidney in a bag and then pull it out through the vagina.

For anyone who has had a baby, it does sound like a piece of cake. The average kidney is the size of a clenched fist and weighs just a quarter pound. Compare that to seven pounds!