Today we celebrate St. Brigid a woman who played a critical role in Irish history. Her feast day marks the end of the darkness of winter and heralds the new season of hope and growth. Along with St. Patrick, Brigid is the co-patroness of Ireland. She is also the patron saint of poets and is known for her miracles of healing for the disenfranchised. I wrote the following poem about St. Brigid.
Frederick Buechner in his memoir The Sacred Journey says that God speaks to us in our personal lives and he believes that “(his) life and the lives of everyone who has ever lived, or will ever live, as not journeys through time but as sacred journeys.” I’m reminded that journeys often have unexpected happenings that puzzle us. A friend just went to Iceland and hoped to see the Northern Lights. Unfortunately, she encountered the clouds, wind, and rain dimming her view of any lights. She reveled, however, in the volcanic hot springs, the Cathedral of Rejkjavik, and the friends she found who helped when she lost her billfold. My own health journey has recently met a curve in the road when I was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. I am so blessed, however, by the support of expert medical professionals, friends and family, and persons who have either been a donor or a recipient of a kidney. If you want to learn more about my journey, go to my website: https://sharonneedsakidney.org
College Friends: Susan, Sandy, Ellen, and Beat, Journey to Weston, Vermont, 2011
The universe is made of stories, not atoms. — Muriel Rukeyser
On October 9, 1996, I gave my brother Robin a kidney. Twenty years of diabetes had worn out his renal system. Several months of research and soul-searching led to my decision. In the process, I learned about strengths in myself and my family, and about the great need in many homes for rescue from kidney failure. Time and again, people I spoke with recounted stories of loved ones who had suffered and sometimes died. I couldn’t let this happen to my brother. Robin had written me the year before from his home in Windham, New Hampshire. He had just completed a battery of tests to get on the New England Kidney Transplant list. He was already three months into peritoneal dialysis: 45-minute sessions four times a day to eliminate wastes from his body. Although he never asked for help, and didn’t like the thought of surgery himself, I offered to donate one of my kidneys. My mother, father, and younger brother were also finding out whether they were suitable candidates. During the next several months, I went through tissue typing, crossmatching and antibody screening, urine tests and x-rays to make sure this could work, that I wouldn’t give Robin some strange disease, and that I could undergo surgery with minimal risk to myself. By the end, I was the most poked and prodded healthy person I knew. I also met Tom, a donor, who lifted his shirt so I could see his scar. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be: thin as a strand of yarn, nine inches long, midway between ribcage and hip bone. My mother, anxious to help, was deemed too slight in weight to risk undergoing surgery and had too small a kidney to make the effort worthwhile. My father, at 69, though willing to the very end and healthy in every way, was considered at the cut-off age for donations. My other brother, as sole supporter of a larger family than mine, seemed less optimal. We were all half-matches during tissue typing — 3 out of 6 — offering partial compatibility with my brother’s immune system. Antirejection drugs would make up the difference.
“You’re the best candidate,” I was told in May. Gulping, I said, “Okay.” Something I was theoretically willing to do was suddenly a reality. Explaining my decision to family and friends, I was touched by the expressions of love and concern. I heard things that sometimes aren’t spoken until someone’s funeral, and I wasn’t even dead yet! Some said I was a hero, reminding me of Emerson’s statement, “A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.” The true hero was my brother, who had been braver twenty years longer. Because of low blood sugar problems, he had totalled a car twice and been taken out of work in an ambulance a couple of times. About his dialysis he said, “I always thought that I could use that time to get something done. But I felt so tired, so drained, that I could never do anything useful.” Having never been to war or played professional sports, I felt this was my one chance to be brave, to be part of a heroic moment, to participate in a miracle. As Aristotle said, “We become brave by doing brave things.” During this period, Cathy Pratt, the transplant coordinator at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was like a best friend. I could ask her any question and I was free, right up to the surgery, to change my mind. Along the way, I pondered many things: Could a kidney from a cadaver work just as well? Would a donation from my dad work out, with a second kidney from me later if problems arose? How would my two small children react to the news? Would the recovery be difficult during such a busy time in my life?
Through it all, my wife Burchell was a wealth of understanding. Her brother had also been living with diabetes the past twenty years. In fact, on February 26, 1997, in a separate act of courage, she donated a kidney to her brother. With all the preparation and recovery of two surgeries in six months, we dubbed this,The Year of the Transplant. Live kidney transplants average 13 years, while those from a cadaver average eight. Those five extra years seemed a precious gift to a father of four sons. Living related donation would mean closer tissue matching and a higher success rate. Because we’d be in adjoining surgical suites, the time the kidney was without a blood supply, the ischemic time, would be greatly reduced. Finally, by scheduling the surgery we could gather the needed support and go into it emotionally and psychologically prepared. Outside of calls to Cathy, I explored the Internet. I read first-hand accounts of organ donation and listened in on the back and forth of an online newsgroup. I learned that the operation would be less risky than an appendectomy, a hernia repair, or a gall bladder removal. As for life with just one kidney, after a six-week recovery period, everything would be back to normal. The remaining kidney knows immediately that it’s going solo and takes on 70 percent of the work of cleansing the body. Gradually, it grows and does 80 percent. Since kidney function above 25 percent is considered normal, there’s a broad range. As Jeff Punch, a transplant surgeon and principle author of the TransWeb site, says, “It is as if we are born with a spare.'” Or, put more simply by my friend Jean’s fiver-year-old daughter, “He’s giving some of his healthiness to his brother.” It was true: I had health enough to share. Horace Henriques, the transplant surgeon, is as skillful with his choice of words as he is with his hands. When I met him the day before surgery, he put me right at ease. He told me of his plan to make an incision along the line of my left ribcage, thereby avoiding my stomach muscles and making recovery faster. I asked him if he listened to music while operating. He said he didn’t, but if he did it would probably be something by Pink Floyd. Since 1992, when Dr. Henriques performed New Hampshire’s first kidney transplant, he had done around 120 such procedures prior to my visit. Dr. Henriques had a fairly easy time with me, since I’m thin and long-waisted. But it’s harder to take a kidney out than to put it into its new location. My brother kept both his kidneys, functioning at 17 percent, in addition to the new organ that was placed in his pelvic area. Around 10:30 that Wednesday morning, Dr. Henriques began suturing my kidney into my brother, attaching the blood vessels to their new sites in the retroperitoneum. As the clamps were removed, the organ turned from a cool gray to warm pink, and urine immediately started coming out of the dangling ureter. After a year and a half of dialysis, with a backlog of waste products to filter from his body, Robin’s new kidney went right to work. While still at the hospital, late at night after my parents and wife left, my brother would pop his head in and visit with me. In fact, during our brief stay we spent more time together than in the past 20 years. We spoke of how much we meant to each other. I felt as though I’d gotten my brother back from the rigors of diabetes, fatherhood, and years of full time work. Having entered the hospital too weak to walk his dog, falling listless as they drew his blood, he now looked as though he was ready to bound outdoors the day after surgery. After leaving the hospital, I stretched out in a chaise lounge on the porch of a friend’s house in Quechee, watched the sun come up, and was overwhelmed by the feeling of being alive, of having done a wonderful thing, of how precious we all are. I closed my eyes and saw a white light with two kidney-shaped objects inside, revolving around. As they were gradually absorbed into the one light, I had the realization that we are all of one light, light sharing with light. Five weeks later, already back to riding my bike to work, I started having lapses where I forgot I ever had major surgery. The scar is snake-like, a sigmoid or s-shaped incision seven inches long. Aside from recovering from the anesthesia, I regained my good health quickly. As for my brother, he recovered well and had almost more energy than he knew what to do with. As each six month period passed without a rejection episode, confidence grew. Dr. Henriques told me, after six months without a rejection, Robin was looking at another twenty years with my kidney. After the first year, he could now hope for another forty years of use. The oldest kidney transplant still in use dates back to 1963 and is going strong. But as I said to Robin, “I’ve got to stop calling it my kidney. It’s yours. I obviously don’t need it anymore. You can keep it.” Going through this process was not without stress. It’s on a par with getting married or having a child. It spans the emotional gamut, taps all your energy and provides you with a story for the rest of your life. My spouse, as primary support, learned some important lessons. She was unprepared for how emotionally draining it would be. Not physically hard, it was nevertheless empathically exhausting. She had helped her best friend give birth the week before; helping me recuperate was more tiring. She and my sister-in-law drew strength from each other and grew close. How did we broach the topic with our children? We never hid the fact that their uncles are diabetic. We visited the hospital and played at the playground to give them a positive image of where we’d be. Open communication, rather than a sudden announcement, led Cornelia, at age 7, to figure it out on her own. Sam, age 3, had a harder time. Beforehand, he watched a Curious George video about going to the hospital and we read him a book about the body. Afterward, he still acted out.
He had tantrums. The more I returned to normal routines, the better he got. Just to sit in my lap and to get “big, hard hugs” was reassuring that Daddy would indeed be okay. Beyond family, our church community was a help, bringing hot dinners, raking leaves, walking with me, and keeping me company. Cards arrived, routine perhaps for the sender but very meaningful for the receiver. I felt cared for, helped along, nurtured. The chances of being a donor are 17 out of a million. The experience of having a kidney lifted from my body and brought to life in my brother is the closest I will ever come to giving birth. I cherished the opportunity to make a tangible difference in someone’s life. As Robin said, “It’s hard to express in words how thankful I am. The difference is that now I have hope.”
The wait for kidney transplant recipients is often long. About 76% of transplants are done using a kidney from a deceased person, and waiting times of four to five years for a deceased donor kidney are common, according to Anne Paschke, media relations specialist for the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a private, nonprofit organization that manages the nation’s organ-transplant system under contract with the federal government.
In Rhode Island, 286 candidates are waiting for a kidney transplant at the state’s transplant hospital, Rhode Island Hospital, Paschke said.
There were a record 24,670 kidney transplants in the United States last year, and the total number of kidney transplants so far this year is slightly ahead of the number at the same point last year, according to Paschke.
Fifty-one kidney transplants were done at Rhode Island Hospital last year; 16 of them were living-donor transplants, Paschke said.
From Jack Perry’s article “For This Cranston Doctor, healing the sick meant donating a kidney,” Providence Journal
Dr. Stephanie Krusz has dedicated her adult life to healing the ill and injured, treating 20 patients a day in a Cranston primary-care practice.
But she went beyond even that high calling on Sept. 7 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston when she gave one of her kidneys to the brother of a close friend.
Krusz’s gift probably saved the life of Glen Rodrigues, a gym owner in Lynn, Massachusetts, who spent two years on dialysis because of kidney failure, including 30 days while he was in a coma after contracting COVID-19.
Dr. Stephanie Krusz
“She is a top doctor. A lot of people say they can’t (become kidney donors) because they don’t have the time. She’s very, very busy. If she can do it, I think anyone can,” Glen Rodrigues’s sister Brenda said of her friend Krusz.
Brenda feared her brother would die. “For him to be alive today, he’s got a purpose,” said Brenda, a Cranston resident. “His story is so unbelievable. It’s about hope and never giving up.”
Krusz and Brenda have been friends for “many years. Thank God I have her,” Brenda said. Both women are runners, and they train together. Brenda shared her brother’s story with Krusz. Glen is a bodybuilder and professional trainer, and his kidney problems were detected in 2013, the result of high blood pressure. By 2019, it became clear he’d need a new kidney, and in October 2020, he went on dialysis, the process of removing waste products and excessive fluid from the blood
On three days each week — Monday, Wednesday and Friday — Glen, 51, spent four hours a day on dialysis. Sundays were the worst, he said, because he’d have gone 48 hours without having his blood cleaned, and the toxins would build up.
“He wasn’t living,” Brenda said. “He was a mess.”
“I didn’t urinate for two years,” Glen said.
“It was a battle,” he said.
Fifteen friends and family members, including his fiancee, Krystal Patch, submitted information to determine if they could provide a matching kidney. All were rejected, for one reason or another.
Recently my poem My Best Friend Leaves the Convent was accepted for publication by the literary magazine Speckled Trout Review, Fall 2022. The editors also featured me in their online preview. You can read my poem and by going to this website. Just click on the link above. I have a chapbook ready for publication, a collection of my poems on my early life as a Sister of Mercy. Sometime within the next year, I’m hoping to publish this chapbook and/or a full length book of my poems.
Reading my poetry at Porter Square Bookstore in Cambridge, MA
Md. woman donated kidney to stranger after seeing request on internet mailing list
Liza Porat glanced at her phone while sitting in her car at a stoplight and saw the request posted on an internet mailing list for her Silver Spring neighborhood. “Needed,” it read, “A kidney for a 41-year-old New York woman.”
Porat, a 57-year-old mother of five and lawyer, drove on, and at the next stoplight, she quickly responded: Sure, she’d be willing to go through dozens of tests and procedures, travel, put her work on hold — at times — and see if she was a match.
So began her months-long process to donate a kidney to a stranger with the help of Chaya Lipschutz, who runs a website called KidneyMitzvah. Despite the Jewish reference in her website, Lipschutz says she helps people of all races and religions. From her apartment in Brooklyn, Lipschutz — a 65-year-old former secretary for a nonprofit — posts notices for kidney and liver patients in need of new organs and success stories of donors who’ve given.
She started her work in 2005 after she donated a kidney to a stranger. With no staff and no budget, Lipschutz uses internet mailing lists and online groups to match donors and recipients. She’s helped about 70 people navigate the donor and recipient process.
“People ask, ‘Can I give you a gift?’” Lipschutz said when she’s able to helpdonors and recipients. “I say, ‘No, no, no.’ When a match goes through, that’s my reward. This is the greatest happiness in the world.”
While there are many organizations and people who try to help link organ donors and recipients, those who’ve worked with Lipschutz said she’s unique: She charges no fees and brings a lot of energy and a caring spirit.
“She’s enthusiastic, and she puts her heart into everything she does,” said Marian Charlton, a clinical manager for a kidney transplant center in New Jersey who’s worked with Lipschutz. “She approaches everything 100 percent, full on.”
Stuart M. Greenstein, a kidney transplant surgeon at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, said Lipschutz is “truly passionate” about working with recipients and donors.
“She’s helping other people and not making any money off it,” Greenstein said. “She does it purely because she wants to help.”
Porat says she didn’t know anything about Lipschutz until she spotted the post for Marianna Ilyasova ona Silver Spring neighborhood mailing list.
Ilyasova, a college professor who also has a tax service business, had been suffering with kidney failure for five years and was doing dialysis several times a week. At one point, her health had deteriorated so much that she could hardly urinate. She’d heard about Lipschutz through a friend and asked her to post a message she had
written: “I’m crying day & night & praying to God for him to show me what a day looks like by feeling healthy. I have lost all my strength & can’t even walk without aid.”
She continued, describing multiple health complications from her kidney failure. “Dialysis sucks out all nutrients & minerals from the body,” she wrote. “Every day, getting more critical. I don’t want to die! Please help me!”
Porat read the message. It was her birthday,and her closest childhood friend had recently receiveda newkidney. Porat said she planned to make a donation to a local kosher food bank in honor of her own birthday and in gratitude for her friend’s transplant. But when she read Ilyasova’s plea, she thought, “I can’t overlook this.”
She and Ilyasova went through months of testing to see if they were a match. They underwent transplant surgery in October. After the procedure, they met in person for the first time at the hospital,and Ilyasova cried.
“She saved my life. I thought I was going to die. I was trying to look for a donor and hanging on to the thought that I want to someday be married, become a mom and see my childreIlyasova said. “She helped me save that dream. She’s my angel on Earth.”
They’re both doing well after the surgery.
Porat hopes her tale will encourage others to become kidney donors.
“If I have it in my power to save a life, how do you turn away?” she said. “I couldn’t do that. She’s someone’s kid. … She’s a woman, and she’s a member of the Jewish community, and we’re supposed to look out for each other.”
Marianna Ilyasova of New York, left, after she received a kidney from Liza Porat of Silver Spring (Chaya Lipschultz)
Today is the anniversary of my father’s death. He died in 1968 on Christmas Eve when I was age 21. He had artistic and engineering talent and used these skills in his work in the textile mills in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Dad designed the silk fabrics that were sent to New York and used to make men’s ties. He loved Christmas and expressed this in some meaningful creation every year. Once we had a full size manger scene on the front lawn. Another year a Santa, sleigh, and reindeer that covered the side of the house. The picture below is the Christmas card Dad created when I was an infant.
