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.
“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.
Kidney donors are not easily found
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.
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Fifty-one kidney transplants were done at Rhode Island Hospital last year; 16 of them were living-donor transplants, Paschke said.
In November of 2020, Krusz stepped forward and filled out a donor screening form to see if she would be a match for Glen. Knowing she and Glen had the same blood type, Krusz made her decision while she and Brenda were on a run and talking about Glen. “I just felt like this was what I was meant to do,” Krusz said.
Good news. She was a match. A lot of tests followed in Rhode Island and Boston, but Glen Rodrigues caught COVID in March 2021. He was hospitalized and slipped into a coma for 21 days. His heart couldn’t beat normally, and he suffered several minor strokes. He was on a ventilator and feeding tubes. Doctors had to cut Glen’s rib cage open to “drain blood surrounding and draining my heart,” he said.
“I spent my 50th birthday in a coma,” Glen said.
Spending six weeks in Massachusetts General Hospital, Glen lost 50 pounds. “When I woke up, I had to learn how to walk, I had to learn how to talk again,” he said.
Slowly, he recovered.
And he waited.
The solution: A doctor and a donor
Krusz, 54, grew up in Woonsocket, graduated from the University of Rhode Island, served in the Air Force and graduated from Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School. In addition to her role at Cranston Primary Care, Krusz is the medical director at The Cedars acute-care facility in Cranston. Though good friends with Brenda, Krusz barely knew Glen before starting the donor screening process, but as time passed, they became close friends. When Glen was hospitalized with COVID, Krusz helped Patch, his fiancee, and
Brenda translate the waves of complicated information coming from doctors and nurses.
After Glen got out of the hospital, Brenda, Glen and his daughter, Eva, 6, would visit Krusz at her Cranston home on Sundays. The gang would hang out by the pool, but Glen, still on dialysis three days a week, would often feel too sick and have to rest inside on the couch. That hardened Krusz’s resolve to help.
Finally, the transplant was scheduled at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in March 2022, but it had to be postponed. It was rescheduled for August but was canceled just a few days before when a test showed Glen’s white blood count was low.
“They pulled the plug again,” Glen said. “This was the most devastating one. I was 48 hours away from getting a kidney.”
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The transplant date was so close, Krusz’s co-workers had thrown a party for her — a going-away party for her kidney, which they called Ken.
The cancellation wasn’t easy on Krusz, either. For a doctor with some 2,000 patients, taking a week away from work isn’t as simple as finding somebody to cover a few shifts. About 100 appointments, some made a year in advance, had to be rescheduled.
Krusz’s practice, Cranston Primary Care, is part of South County Health. She says the organization was supportive and accommodating of her efforts to help Glen.
Krusz told Glen, “I’ll do whatever I need to do when they give us a date.”
After the cancellation, doctors linked Glen’s lowered white blood cell count to one of his medications. He was taken off that medication and, after monitoring, the transplant was rescheduled for Sept. 7.
Krusz, 54, acknowledges being scared. It was her first time having surgery. “For the most part, donors do well,” she said, but surgery comes with risks, such as blood loss and infection.
Her sons, Tyler, a 24-year-old sports anchor for a Bangor, Maine, television station, and Cooper, a 20-year-old student at the University of Tampa, were concerned about their mother.
They didn’t have to worry. The surgeries went well for both.
Glen said, “I woke up feeling totally different immediately.”
Glen’s doctor told him most kidney recipients leave the hospital after five to eight days. He was released after four. Now, he’s getting life back to normal. He walks twice a day, 1.5 miles. He’s back in the gym working out, but only with light weights since he was told to keep weights under 10 pounds.
For people receiving a kidney from a living donor in 2020, the survival rate was 98%; it was 93% for those who received a kidney form a deceased donor, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). The organization measures survival rate by the number of transplant recipients who had a functioning kidney one year after their transplant.
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Six days after the operation, Krusz was back at the practice seeing patients. She returned to running 29 days later, going three miles with Brenda. The two women are training for a March half-marathon in New Bedford, where Brenda and Glen grew up.
Aside from some soreness, Krusz says she feels “amazing” about six weeks after the surgery.
“If I had three kidneys, I’d do it again,” she said, “but I need the one I have.”
The United Network for Organ Sharing says those interested in becoming an organ donor can sign up at registerme.org.