Fairbanks Mayor Terry Strle will donate kidney to ailing cousin

[okarol]

Fairbanks Mayor Terry Strle will donate kidney to ailing cousin

By Rebecca George

Published Sunday, September 21, 2008

FAIRBANKS — If there’s a family that can find the bright side and humor of life’s challenges, it’s the Strle family.

From bad jokes to old sibling pranks, Fairbanks Mayor Terry Strle says her family is one of the funniest groups of people she’s ever known.

And she loves them dearly because of it.

So dearly that she’s donating a kidney in November to a close cousin suffering from a hereditary kidney disease.

The mayor doesn’t bat an eye when she tells people in her matter-of-fact way that she’s donating a kidney.

“It’s just a kidney, and I have two of them, so I might as well share one,” she said.

But the person receiving the kidney, Kathy Strle, sees it differently.

“It’s scary to me,” she said. “But Terry isn’t scared of anything, and when she sets her mind to something, she just goes and does it. She’s always been crazy like that.”

The mayor and Kathy, who is only a month older, were virtually inseparable as they grew up in a small town outside Chicago.

“Terry’s mom was like a second mother to us,” she said. “Our families were always going on vacation together, hanging out on the weekends and we just did everything together.”

The Strle family all lived within blocks of one other.

“We hung out all the time either at my house or hers,” Kathy said. “If we couldn’t spend the night at each other’s house, we cried until we got our way.”

Kathy’s mother died of polycystic kidney disease (PKD) when Kathy was just 2 years old. Kathy’s grandmother also had the disease.

PKD is a rare genetic disorder that attacks sufferers’ kidneys, causing the body to grow multiple kidney cysts that often result in kidney failure. There is no known cure for the disorder, and a kidney transplant is the only known solution to avoid total kidney failure. Transplanted kidneys do not develop the disorder.

PKD also afflicted Kathy’s oldest sister, Jackie, who received a kidney transplant about two years ago after being diagnosed in 1986.

But Kathy was in denial about her own health until, on June 3, 2006, she went to a Chicago hospital for a foot ailment, and the doctors told her she was in serious kidney failure.

“I didn’t care about my darn kidneys; I just wanted to know if they could fix my foot,” she remembered telling doctors. “But things were so out of whack it wasn’t even funny at the time.”

According to the mayor and the mayor’s sister, Linda Strle, Kathy had been experiencing symptoms — blurred vision and bruising easily — but Kathy never thought much of it until that day.

It was only when doctors marched Kathy into the intensive care unit and hooked her up to a dialysis machine that she started to take her health more seriously.

The mayor and her sister, Linda, still laugh, lovingly, about the story every time they tell it.

Kathy laughs about it, too.

According to each of the three women, stubborn will is a Strle trait.

“You know we never let anything die in the Strle family, and there isn’t a single Strle who wouldn’t have tested for Kathy’s sake,” Linda said.

During the 2007 general election, Mayor Strle began undergoing extensive tests to make sure she was eligible to donate.

That testing process took almost a year, and the end result comes Nov. 5 when one of the mayor’s kidneys will be transplanted in a Wisconsin hospital.

The mayor said she has no reservations about the process and is thrilled to be donating the kidney to her cousin.

She did ask the council for permission to be excused from the Nov. 3 city council meeting because she will be en route to Wisconsin for the transplant.

The mayor will return to Fairbanks on Nov. 18.

Kathy is equally thrilled and is excited about having freedom again.

Every night for the past two years, Kathy has retired to her home at 8:30 to hook up to a dialysis machine for eight hours.

And after her transplant, one of the first things she wants to do is travel to Fairbanks, even though she hates to fly.

But when asked if she’d be up here this winter to check out the northern climate, her only response was, “Are you crazy? I might be losing a kidney, but I didn’t lose my mind.”

Kathy plans to travel to Fairbanks next summer.

600,000 Americans suffer from PKD

Polycystic kidney disease is a progressive genetic disease that affects more than 600,000 Americans.

The disease damages the kidneys, eventually causing a total loss of kidney function when multiple cysts grow and take over the organ. Cysts also can grow on the pancreas and liver.

People get the disease from a parent who carries the gene.

Even if a parent doesn’t show symptoms of the disease, he or she can still carry the defective gene that causes the disorder and pass it to their children.

In later stages of the disease, patients are often required to go on dialysis or have a kidney transplant.

There is no direct treatment or cure, according to the Polycystic Kidney Disease Foundation, though many patients take medicine to alleviate the symptoms of the disorder.

Fairbanks Mayor Terry Strle, like all living donors, had to undergo an extensive series of tests from simple blood work to an extensive medical background check to ensure she was healthy enough for the transplant.

The process of donating her kidney took months, and many of the tests had to be triple-checked before doctors declared Strle to be a good match.

According to an article from the Polycystic Kidney Disease Foundation’s Web site, about 3,000 Americans affected with the genetic disease are on a wait list for a kidney transplant.

“Most transplanted kidneys come from people who have recently died,” the article stated.

The article also explained that a shortage of kidney donations from cadavers has caused a growing number of donations from living family members and friends of sufferers, helping to shorten the wait list for kidney transplants on a national level.

http://newsminer.com/news/2008/sep/21/fairbanks-mayor-terry-strle-will-donate-kidney-ail/