Woman's adopted daughter gives her a kidney, new life

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Miracles are real

Woman's adopted daughter gives her a kidney, new life

By Janet Ortegon
Sheboygan Press staff

O nce upon a time, Kathy Ringel of Sheboygan saved the life of a young Korean girl who had never had a real home. As an adult and a member of the enormous blended family Ringel built in service to God, that little girl returned the favor.

Ringel, 69, was suffering from end-stage renal failure — the result of polycystic kidney disease — when seven people volunteered to be tested as possible kidney donors. For a variety of reasons, only Ringel's adopted daughter, Kelly Kaat, was a suitable donor.

The transplant happened in July at Froedtert Memorial Hospital in Wauwatosa, and both women are now fine and healthy and looking forward to Ringel's first healthy Christmas in three years.

But that's only the beginning of the story.

In 1969, Ringel turned her life over to God. She prayed for direction and felt called to tend to homeless children. Right away, she felt a pull to children in Korea who needed good homes, and her first adopted child from Korea arrived just three weeks after her fifth baby was born. He was 8, and he was soon joined by two more children from Korea, including Kelly, and one special-needs foster child Kathy also adopted.

The nine kids were joined over the years by 11 long-term, special-needs foster children who also called Kathy mom. Twenty-two years ago, Ken Ringel joined the family with his own two children.

Kaat, now 44, remembers coming to Ringel's home and looking forward to having a lot of brothers and sisters.

"I was excited," Kaat said. "Knowing they had many kids, I was very excited."

Kaat and the other two Korean children were in the same grade and the large family was one of the first to enroll at the new Lutheran High School.

"Can you believe that?" Kaat said. "We didn't get away with much."

With a husband, a stepson and two daughters of her own, Kaat decided earlier that she wasn't ready to lose her mom to kidney disease.

"I told myself if I had the matching kidney, I would give it to Mom," she said. "I'd made that decision. Just getting that initial phone call, my heart was pumping: 'Oh my gosh, I could be the one.'"

And that's what she told her mom after she got the call from the hospital.

"And I said, 'Kelly, do you realize what a miracle that is?'" Ringel recalled. "That's what I say to everybody. It was a miracle."

Before she came to Ringel, Kaat bounced from home to home beginning when she was a very tiny child in Korea. She tears up now when she talks about it — living first with relatives in Korea and then spending three years in an orphanage, being adopted by a family in the United States and finally leaving that home to join Ringel's family.

"It was a long journey," is all she says, but her mom agrees that if any one of those homes had worked out better, Kaat wouldn't have been where she was when Ringel needed a kidney.

Donors are selected using a variety of benchmarks, including the person's health, the medications they're taking, their blood type and a number of other things, Ringel said.

The volunteers — family members and people from her church, Southside Alliance— were tested one at a time, and only Kaat was a match.

"When you are willing to do God's will, he works out the details," Ringel said.

That's exactly how her husband feels, as well. Ken Ringel said he wasn't worried as his wife and stepdaughter were preparing for surgery because he knew they were in good hands.

"If God put this together that way, there was no doubt it was going to be a success," he said. "As it started to unfold, I just believed God had arranged this many years ago — it was too much to be coincidence."

Ringel, who smiles easily and likes to get up early in the morning so as not to waste a moment, said the two years before the transplant were difficult ones. She spent a long time on dialysis, going to the Aurora Sheboygan Clinic as well as doing it on her own at home.

"I didn't like it, and that scared the grandkids," she said of the process that had her hooking up dialysis equipment in the living room every four hours. She then tried another method, doing the dialysis at night, which had its own pitfalls and disadvantages. And through it all, she got sicker and sicker.

Eventually she agreed to a transplant — which she originally refused because she didn't think she would tolerate surgery well enough — and after Kaat was identified as a match the process moved quickly.

"I had a real peace," Ringel said, explaining why she never felt afraid of the surgery. "I felt like whatever the outcome would be I'd be a winner. If I died, I'd be in heaven. If I lived, I'd have a new life."

But with a Christmas tree in the window and piles of presents wrapped and ready for the children, the 30 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, Ringel's gratitude is as visible as her Christmas spirit.

"We've had great-grandchildren born, we have weddings coming up, and I would've missed all those things," Ringel said. "I have never doubted his plan. It was the perfect plan for me and I would do it in a heartbeat again."

Reach Janet Ortegon at 453-5121 or jortegon@sheboygan-press.com

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