Transplants alter their lives, careers

Published: May 8, 2011 3:00 a.m.
Transplants alter their lives, careers

Angela Mapes Turner | The Journal Gazette

How much of what you do is tied up in who you are?

Sue Sell’s midlife career shift to nursing directly relates to her experiences as a mother, particularly to her middle child.

She’s coming off her shift at Lutheran Hospital, where she is a registered nurse. A noisy espresso machine in a coffee kiosk next to her hisses and sputters as Sell, still dressed in scrubs, sits down at a hospital café table.

The reason she wears the scrubs sits next to her. It’s her daughter Marissa Brunson, who though not a nurse is nearly as familiar with nurses as her mother.

Sue Sell married at age 18, and the couple soon had a daughter, Brittany. Next came Marissa, now 28, and a son, Levi.

Together, they ran the family’s agricultural business in Huntington County, and Sell ran a cleaning business on the side.

The Sell family had a stereotypical Midwestern existence in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Until Marissa got sick.

Rare diagnosis

Marissa Brunson dresses stylishly and has long, eye-catching red hair.

Her slender hands and hollow cheeks give her a look of fragility, and in some ways, that’s appropriate – they’re outward signs of her illness.

The symptoms began in third grade. She began losing fat in her upper body and face and a school physical showed her kidneys were failing.

Trips to Cincinnati, to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and to Indiana University in Bloomington followed. Marissa was diagnosed with membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis, Type II – MPGN Type II for short – a condition as serious as the weighty name suggests.

The rare autoimmune kidney disease would eventually result in her needing a kidney transplant, the family was told.

Life for Marissa went on, if not quite as normal. In part because she had to avoid contact sports, she played varsity softball all four years of high school.

Most spectators didn’t know she’d gone on dialysis in eighth grade, treatments that continued through high school until her disease progressed so far that she finally was added to a transplant waiting list.

The summer before her senior year of high school, in 2000, she had a kidney transplant.

Her mother remembers feeling guilt through those years – for a couple of reasons.

“As a parent, first off, you go through a lot of guilt that you’ve done something, or missed something,” Sell said.

Family members weren’t matches, and Marissa’s kidney came from a donor who had just died. That, too, caused guilty feelings, Sell said.

But for her daughter, it meant a fresh start.

“It was nerve-racking, but exciting at the same time,” Brunson said.

That kidney functioned into her first year of college at Indiana University, when she began having complications. Her doctors asked her to quit school, saying the full course load was causing too much stress on her body, and she did.

Brunson went back on dialysis in December 2004. In July 2005, she got a call saying a new kidney was waiting.

Brunson said she didn’t experience as much stress during the second transplant because she knew what to expect.

She waves her thin hand in a dismissive gesture.

“It was nothing,” she said.

Her mother smiles and disagrees. Sue Sell said her guilt compounded a bit on the occasion of her daughter’s second transplant.

In November 2005, Dow Sell – Sell’s brother-in-law and Brunson’s uncle – died of bacterial meningitis.

His organs were donated, and Sell said that finally, her guilt was gone. She recalls her mother-in-law being told by a grateful organ recipient, “I get to be a father again; I get to be a grandfather.”

“You’re on the other end, and it’s the only thing that makes sense,” she said. “Out of their death, something good has to happen.”

She gestures toward her daughter.

“We know what that’s like, because she gets to have a life,” Sell said.

Mother and nurse

That life for Brunson has included going back to college and her wedding in 2009 to a high school classmate she didn’t know at school but met online years later.

Meanwhile, her mother was undergoing a transformation of her own, influenced in large part by the nurses she met during her daughter’s many hospital stays. They told her she’d make a good nurse herself.

As Brunson’s first transplanted kidney was failing, Sell, now 48, began to think seriously about a career change.

“I decided, ‘I’ve put up with all this,’ ” she said. “All the puking, the cleaning up, the emotions – and thought I could do it.”

In the fall of 2005, after Brunson’s second transplant, both mother and daughter began classes at Ivy Tech Community College.

The daughter graduated in 2007 as a certified medical assistant, and her mother has been a licensed nurse for nearly three years.

After a short time at St. Joseph Hospital working in various departments, Sell took a job at Lutheran Hospital in the cardiovascular intensive care and transplant units.

Occasionally, Sell will tell a transplant patient about her daughter, and when patients hear Brunson’s had two transplants, they’re encouraged.

Once in a while, she gets emotional being around transplant patients, such as a young girl who reminded her of her daughter.

“I know what the mother goes through,” she said. “People don’t mind if you get a little emotional.”

Mother and daughter are close in many aspects of their lives, such as their weekly engagement tutoring Burmese students and their work on the family farm.

But the transplants have brought them together in other ways. Both volunteer for the Indiana Organ Procurement Council and hope to participate in the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Walk fundraiser this summer.

Dealing with Brunson’s illness necessitated a change of perspective for her entire family.

“It’s hard to watch your kid be sick, and it’s hard on their siblings,” Sell said. “That kind of illness affects the whole family.”

In fact, Brunson said her oldest sister found out what caused her kidney disease.

While Brittany Funk was studying at IU to become a pathologist’s assistant, she had access to her ailing sister’s files and worked with her doctors.

It’s a rare condition called acquired partial lipodystrophy, which usually develops around ages 8 to 10 and has affected only about 250 people worldwide. The condition accounts for the loss of fat cells in Brunson’s upper body and her kidney failure, found in about one in five cases of partial lipodystrophy.

Before her second kidney transplant, Brunson’s weight dropped to a meager 87 pounds. She was so weak she occasionally had to be carried.

She feels healthy now, and even her daily medication regimen is one third of what it used to be.

Her mother often is off the farm, working in a hospital. And Brunson generally is out of hospitals, keeping the books for her family’s ag business, even running the combine for a while last year – an undertaking she couldn’t have imagined during her weaker periods.

“It’s actually fun,” she said. “It’s very peaceful.”

aturner@jg.net

http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20110508/LOCAL/305089910