The gift of a lifetime

The gift of a lifetime

BY KATIE ANDERSON
December 25, 2008 - 1:14PM

Terry Lacy’s kidneys have been deteriorating since he was 8 years-old.

This year, at age 42, his chronic IgA nephrothapy had left both kidneys combined functioning at six percent.

In March 2005, Mr. Lacy, of Virginia, underwent an operation to receive a new kidney from friend Richard Jackson.

That transplant failed.

Almost immediately after, another acquaintance, Melissa Harper, stepped forward to donate.

After two years of testing and waiting, Ms. Harper had to cancel transplant plans because she became pregnant.

This December, Mr. Lacy’s prayers were answered.

On Dec. 6, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Mr. Lacy got a new-to-him, disease-free kidney.

LIFE BEFORE

“I was always tired.” Mr. Lacy remembers.

“He’d fall asleep so early,” said his wife Jeannette. “It felt like we were 70 year-olds in 40-year old’s bodies.”

And there was the dialysis.

Mr. Lacy remembers the first time he entered Davita Healthcare, “the morgue” as he calls it. He would go three times a week for three hours each day so the machines there could filter his blood and eliminate waste water from his system.

He remembers seeing a room full of bodies, mostly older, asleep and stiff and motionless in the dialysis chairs. And Mr. Lacy remembers hating it.

After a while, the once-active 41-year-old developed restless leg syndrome, as some dialysis patients do, and he had to be further immobilized - his arm taped down during the three hour process.

Life for the Lacys was planned around dialysis.

Mr. Lacy remembers missing out on helping his son Terris, 18, work on his demolition derby cars, and Mrs. Lacy remembers how impossible it was to try to plan even a small trip.

Mr. Lacy, father of four and a once a very active man, admits he could not bare the thought of feeling weak and relying on the machines at “the morgue” for the rest of his life. He saw other, older patients in the dialysis center give up on the treatments and resign themselves to sickness and eventual death.

While still hopeful for a donor, nearing the end of his second year on dialysis with a failed transplant behind him, Mr. Lacy admits that he did not know how much longer he would have wanted to continue.

THE DONOR

“Our story is a little bit different than most,” explains Richelle Rawlings, the 30-year-old mother of one, who donated her kidney to Mr. Lacy.

Ms. Rawlings did not know Mr. Lacy in March 2007 when she volunteered to give him one of her kidneys.

The Jacksonville woman was having a conversation with her friend Terri Engelmann about the idea that one person can make a difference in another’s life when Ms. Engelmann, then an employee at Davita where Mr. Lacy was getting dialysis, mentioned her patient.

“(Ms. Engelmann) said, ‘You know, there is a gentleman out there that needs a kidney,’” remembers Ms. Rawlings. “And then it just came out of my mouth — I’ll give him one.”

Ms. Rawlings remembers being awed at what felt like an involuntary response coming from her lips.

“But not one single minute, not a second did I change my mind,” she said. “And that reassured me that this was something God wanted me to do, not just something that I wanted to do.”

Next she studied.

“I looked at millions of sites, clinical research, and talked to my doctors and talked to other doctors before I even went to Terry,” she said.

There was some static from family and friends, but Ms. Rawlings said, eventually through education about organ donation, they were swayed.

When Ms. Rawlings did finally meet Mr. Lacy it was weeks later at the dialysis center during one of his treatments.

Mr. Lacy remembers asking Ms. Rawlings over and over, “are you sure you want to do this,” while in his head, he admits, he was saying, “all right lets get this started!”

THE TRANSPLANT

At first things went well, Mr. Lacy and Ms. Rawlings blood and tissue types matched. Ms. Rawlings even discovered that her birthmark was located on her skin right above her kidney.

An operation seemed ordained.

But the couple met troubles.

Hospital after hospital would not perform the surgery because Ms. Rawlings had health problems. In 2003 she sustained head injuries in a fall and doctors were reluctant to put her under anesthesia.

But neither the Lacys nor Ms. Rawlings lost hope.

“(Terry) kept sticking by me,” Ms. Rawlings said, “We’d get turned down at one hospital and go to the next.”

Visit after visit, the Rawlings and the Lacys traveled together trying to find a hospital that would perform the surgery. In the mean time, they became friends.

The group finally landed in Chicago at Northwestern Medical Center where Dr. Joseph Leventhal said he would perform the surgery.

On Dec. 6, with few complications, the transplant was completed.

“As soon as (Ms. Rawlings’ kidney) got in me it started making urine,” Mr. Lacy remembers excitedly.

THE GIFT

“I didn’t realize what kind of a gift it was until the day after Saturday morning, I got to go down and visit with Terry and he looked like a totally different man,” said Ms. Rawlings. “He went from 50 to 30. He was so happy and looked like he could run laps around the hospital!”

Now on anti-rejection medication with Ms. Rawlings’ kidney working inside of him, Mr. Lacy is at 56 percent function and is filtering his own blood and making urine at a healthy rate.

His challenges now include watching his blood pressure, drinking plenty of water and keeping up with his family who is glad to have their leading man healthy again.

“I feel like a new man,” Mr. Lacy said.

A benefit for the Lacy and Rawlings families to help defray expenses and to donate to kidney research will be held in late March. An exact date has not been given.

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