For LI man, a second brother gives gift of life

For LI man, a second brother gives gift of life

BY EMERSON CLARRIDGE
lidesk@newsday.com

June 15, 2007

The kidney his younger brother gave him nine years ago was failing, but Sandy Denicker tried not to show it, especially to his siblings.

His body ached and he didn't sleep much. For 12 hours each week the retired home improvement contractor who lives in Fort Salonga was attached to tubes that pumped life back into his polluted body.

The kidney he received from his younger brother Tony was failing.

So Tony called Jimmy, the youngest brother.

"It's up to you now," Tony said.

A little after 5 a.m. on Tuesday, Jimmy and Sandy were prepped for surgery at Stony Brook University Medical Center. As they lay in side-by-side gurneys, the brothers looked at each other and cried.

"You want to make sure everything goes well knowing that your brother is going to put part of his body into me," Sandy said Thursday from his hospital room.

As soon as he awoke from the 31/2-hour surgery, Sandy, 63, said he felt like a new man.

"You don't realize being on dialysis how beat up you get," he said. "It's like being reborn again."

Jimmy, 55, of Whitestone, Queens, said there was never any question about what to do.

"I only wish I could have done it sooner," said Jimmy, who went through an extensive screening process that cleared the way for the surgery.

During the months that Sandy Denicker went to his thrice-weekly dialysis treatments, he didn't tell Jimmy that his kidneys were again shutting down. He didn't want to bother him.

Tony Denicker, 58, of St. James, knew. Tony had donated a kidney to Sandy in 1998, and for a while things had returned to normal. Sandy returned to traveling the country playing softball, a game he's loved since his childhood in College Point.

Then, beginning in 2005, the kidney began to fail and the torturous dialysis treatments began again in February 2006.

Both brothers were never on the fence, they never wavered. In both cases, it just took a trip to see the four-hour-long dialysis session to make up his mind to donate.

"Tony just stepped up. He said, 'I'm going to do it and that's it," Jimmy said Thursday, recalling Tony's decision to donate his kidney in 1998.

Jimmy was released from the hospital Thursday night; Sandy is scheduled to leave Saturday.

The Denicker brothers always had a bond. They grew up singing doo wop together on street corners.

They had another brother, Lenny, who died of bladder cancer in 1993 at age 44. The brothers said the cancer was likely connected to Agent Orange, the herbicide used in the Vietnam War. Lenny had served there in the Army. The loss hit Sandy particularly hard, because of among the five siblings, they were the closest in age.

"When Lenny died it just brought us closer together," Jimmy said Thursday.

Dr. Wayne Waltzer, Stony Brook's director of transplantation, performed both of Sandy's transplants. He said that kidney donors should experience no change in their health following surgery. In 2005, 25 percent of kidney transplants involved sibling donors.

Sandy used to play softball with the New York Statesmen, a team based in Commack, and he's hoping "to get back to playing."

"I wanted to be a ball player my whole life," Sandy said. When he wasn't running a contracting business, he was on the field. Many of Sandy's old teammates joined his relatives in the hospital's waiting room Tuesday.

And if, in the future, Sandy's kidney fails, he could withstand another transplant, Waltzer said. And there are a few more siblings ready to help. His sisters, Monica and Rae, are potential donors.

Jimmy and Tony said that they donated simply to help a brother they love.

"That's how it is," Tony said.

Sandy is overflowing with gratitude for his brothers.

"You can't ask for anymore love from anybody," he said. "It means that we done something right together, that's for sure."

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