Kidney donation comes directly from the heart

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Updated: 03/10/09 07:35 AM
Council Member LoCurto finds a miracle match close at hand
Kidney donation comes directly from the heart

By Phil Fairbanks
NEWS STAFF REPORTER

It was back in September, just about the time Mike LoCurto was beginning his search for an organ donor, when Kate Foster blurted out, “I’d give you a kidney.”

Later this month, the Buffalo lawmaker will take his longtime companion up on her offer.

And Foster, head of the University at Buffalo Regional Institute, will get her chance to do something great, something profound.

“I ran a marathon. I wrote a book. I served in the Peace Corps. I bought a house,” Foster said last week. “ ‘I’ve donated a kidney’ rivals all of those. It’s a great thing to do.”

And almost impossible to believe.

Imagine the odds? What were the chances LoCurto and Foster — partners for the past five years—would end up on opposite ends of the same organ transplant?

“It’s certainly better than the iPhone I got from her for Christmas,“ said LoCurto, a Buffalo Common Council member. “It’s obviously a tremendous gift.”

On a recent weekday morning, they sat in Foster’s North Buffalo home and talked of the ups and downs of LoCurto’s illness — he was diagnosed in early 2007—and how Foster came to be his latest hope.

They spoke about why she never thought twice about donating one of her two kidneys and what it says about a relationship that until now has been very private.

Ask her why she’s doing this and Foster will tell you of LoCurto’s discipline in managing his health problems—he had a heart-liver transplant 13 years ago—and his courage in maintaining a sense of contentment despite the obstacles placed in his path.

“The reason I like being around Mike is his story,” says Foster, who admits to being a workaholic at times. “He puts everything in perspective and I need that in my life.”

What’s hard to imagine, to people who know them as a couple, is not that Foster would volunteer but that she proved a suitable match.

There are currently 80,000 people nationwide waiting for a kidney transplant — 500 of them in the Buffalo area. Every year, about 4,000 people die while waiting for a donor.

“It really is amazing,” said Jay Randazzo, one of LoCurto’s oldest friends. “To find someone so close to you who’s a match is incredible.”

It also says volumes about their relationship and the sacrifices they face in making it public. They spoke to The Buffalo News as part of a campaign to raise awareness about organ transplants and the need for more donors.

“Helping out,” said Meg Slotkin, Foster’s sister, “is more important than keeping their relationship private.”

Like a journey filled with hills and valleys, theirs is a story of two people committed to each other in good times and bad, and in a way few other couples can match.

It’s a story that began with LoCurto being diagnosed with thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder, as a 3-month-old infant.

Years later, as a 22-year-old, fresh from City Honors and the University at Buffalo, he would suffer heart failure. He spent the next two years waiting for a new heart and became one of the first people in the nation to undergo a heart-liver transplant.

Despite all that history and all that experience, LoCurto found himself devastated by the prospect of another transplant.

It was May 2007 and LoCurto was knee deep in a hotly contested battle for his Common Council seat. The threat of the illness — so serious that he might not be able to campaign door to door — threw him into a funk.

“I wasn’t expecting it,” he said of the news. “It was a depressing, deeply disappointing time in my life.”

The bad feelings, according to LoCurto, lingered for just a few days.

“You have to play the cards you’re dealt,” he said. “I always try to control the circumstances and not let the circumstances control me.”

After winning the primary, LoCurto turned his attention to finding a donor and getting well. When Foster blurted out her desire to help, no one, least of all her, thought it would actually happen.

When a battery of tests and exams proved her a match, she realized her promise was suddenly real.

“I’m so proud,” Slotkin said of her sister. “Going to see someone in the hospital or baking a casserole is a lot different than going under the knife. What a wonderful role model for my kids.”

For LoCurto, this latest transplant is yet another hurdle in his ongoing battle for normalcy, a simple but difficult goal for someone with chronic health problems.

Even now, he celebrates the annual anniversary of his first surgery, Feb. 24, as if it were a birthday.

Of course, in LoCurto’s eyes, it marked a new start, a new life of sorts.

“It was such a monumental day,” he says now. “Those celebrations are a chance to look back and appreciate that I’m still here and how far I’ve come.”

With any major surgery, there’s nervousness, anxiety and doubt. But for LoCurto, there’s something far different — a great sense of relief and excitement.

There’s relief that his five-hour dialysis treatments—now up to three times a week—will soon come to an end.

And there’s excitement that he’ll have the ability to do the little things most of us take for granted, like eating and drinking what he wants.

“He’s excited,” says Randazzo. “He keeps saying that, after the surgery, the first thing he’s going to do is down 20 gallons of Snapple.”

Even more important, he will continue living by the same life-sustaining credos that got him this far, old sayings like, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Or as he’s prone to do on this day, with his his longtime partner and future kidney donor sitting at his side, echo the words of Michael J. Fox, the actor diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

“If this hadn’t happened to me,” LoCurto says with a smile, “I probably wouldn’t be as happy as I am.”

pfairbanks@buffnews.com

 
 
 
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