Valley resident celebrates three decades since kidney transplant saved his lifeAugust 08, 2010 12:30 AM
THE MONITOR
WESLACO — Robert Rodriguez says he had no idea in 1980 that he would live to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his kidney transplant. That was the year he became the 135th patient at Bexar County Hospital to undergo the transplant operation.
Now Rodriguez, 84, is a grandfather of two and a great-grandfather of one.
A man of few words, Rodriguez said he was “grateful to God” for his health so many years after the operation.
“At the time when he got sick he was weighing about 112 pounds,” his daughter Olga said. “We didn’t think he was going to make it.”
“It was really a shock for us because at that time we didn’t really hear about kidney transplants or dialysis,” she said. “When I would go see him I would cry.”
“A lot of people who were (at the hospital) when he was there were dying,” she remembers.
Rodriguez’s problem was kidney failure, and it was his sister Minerva, who lives in Michigan, who answered the call for a kidney donor.
He will celebrate the transplant anniversary with the annual family barbecue he has thrown at his Weslaco home since the year after the surgery. The first barbecue was on August 13, 1981.
Rodriguez plans to grill the usual – beef kidney, in honor of the surgery that saved his life.
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/saved-115216-celebrates-three.html
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