Kidney transplant enables aromatherapist to emerge from the shadows
Some days, Sonia Rodriguez looks at the clock in her office and can't believe what it says - 9 p.m. Maybe even 10. Long past quitting time.
The hours slip away when she's here at her business, Alchemista Aromatherapy Sanctuary & Spa, which offers body treatments and sells handmade, natural body and bath products - crafted by Rodriguez - that are also used at local resorts.
This is her refuge.
The brick building has big windows that drink in the looming Catalina Mountains. Green vines drip from the covered patio of Casas Adobes Professional Complex, which also houses an optical store, a naturopath and a few other businesses centered on healing. Birds sing. Bunnies hop in the desert out back.
And then there's the scent.
It's hard to nail down. Kind of grassy, a little floral, clean notes of eucalyptus. Alchemista smells like a little bit of everything, and it's all good - soothing and natural.
This tranquil place is a world away from the nonstop traffic that whizzes past, mere feet away, on Oracle Road.
It's even farther from Rodriguez's former home-away-from-home - the dialysis unit of Fresenius Medical Care, where she spent four hours a day, every other day, hooked up to a machine that pulled the blood from her body, cleaned it and sent it coursing back through her veins. Her left arm lay at her side, unusable, beneath a tangle of tubes. In between the squeeze of a blood pressure cuff every 15 minutes, Rodriguez used her right hand to tap on a touch-screen monitor and scour the Internet.
Sometimes the searches were fun, like looking up her favorite singer, Irish songwriter Róisín Murphy. Or researching ideas for the dream business venture she and a friend were mulling. More often, though, the searches were serious. Rodriguez looked for a reason why her kidneys had failed, and, more urgently, for a donor who could give her her old life back - and with it a chance to maybe, just maybe, open that dream business.
Superior was "Like Mayberry"
Rodriguez, 47, grew up in Superior, the older of two children. Her father, Paul, calls them both miracles. Doctors said his wife, Amelia, couldn't bear children.
Superior was the stereotypical small town. One main street. People didn't lock their doors.
"It was like growing up in Mayberry," Rodriguez says fondly.
Everyone knew everybody's business.
"If you did something at school in the first hour of class, your parents knew what you did before you went home for lunch," she says.
After high school, most kids went into the military or community college. Rodriguez's parents expected more.
Her mother, a teacher, stressed the importance of an education. Her father, a World War II and Korean War veteran who worked as a drill operator for a nearby mine, taught her and her younger brother practical skills.
As a result, Sonia developed both sides of her brain. A studious girl who loved sci-fi novels, she spent hours practicing the piano. She also went target shooting with her dad, and from him learned how to use tools.
Any home-improvement project, she was right alongside him. She never met a craft she didn't like and especially enjoyed making soaps, which she learned how to do in high school.
She was student-body president her senior year, then studied molecular and cellular biology at the University of Arizona.
It was during her final semester in 1992 that Rodriguez suffered her first health scare: She lost the hearing in her right ear. Doctors suspected a brain tumor. Tests turned up nothing. So, without any explanation for the deafness, life went on.
Rodriguez fell in love with aromatherapy - when she couldn't find natural soaps she liked made with essential oils, she started making her own and selling them at craft fairs and a local store called The Aroma Tree.
She and a few family members took over the shop in 1999, but the venture didn't last. So Rodriguez started another business making soaps and bath products. That's when her kidneys started failing.
She didn't recognize the symptoms. She felt exhausted and was often overcome by nausea and headaches. She chalked it up to living with a swamp cooler in the summer and trying to get her new business, Alchemista, off the ground.
But when she couldn't get rid of a strange metallic taste in her mouth, no matter how many Jolly Ranchers she sucked on, she got worried. She went to St. Mary's Hospital on July 29, 2005. By Aug. 3, she was on dialysis.
Her kidneys had shut down.
"It was," she says, "the scariest time of my life."
"A life in shadows"
She spent much of the next 4 1/2 years hooked to a machine that cleaned her blood after her kidneys couldn't.
"To me, it was like a life in shadows," she says.
Oh, don't get her wrong - she's grateful. Dialysis kept her alive when an autoimmune disease called ANCA vasculitis robbed her of her kidneys.
But for Rodriguez, who believes she has attention deficit disorder, lying still for several hours was torture. "My mind never stops."
So she let it work for her. She and her friend Jennica Klemann, a massage therapist, started dreaming about starting a mobile spa business. But that would be later. Much later.
For now, there was dialysis. And Alchemista.
Some previous wholesale clients wanted her to make soaps and lotions again. They gave her money upfront. So Rodriguez rented a studio in a south-side neighborhood and got to work.
She'd schedule dialysis in the afternoon and work in the morning, which wasn't easy with the side effects and exhaustion.
"It's kind of like the equivalent of running a marathon," says Rodriguez, who would know. Before she got sick, she participated in a half-marathon in San Francisco.
Her skin was gray, her eyes sunken. She suffered migraines and battled with restless legs syndrome and insomnia.
"You just wanted to jump out of your skin," she says.
Her diet, not that she wanted to eat, was incredibly restrictive. Because her kidneys didn't work, she didn't urinate. She could drink just 32 ounces of water a day.
Sometimes after dialysis, she'd stop the car on the way to her west-side home to throw up. She didn't want her parents, who live with her, to know just how sick she was. But they knew.
"She suffered a lot," recalls Paul Rodriguez. His voice breaks, even years later. "Every time I took her to dialysis, I came back with a broken heart."
Bolstered by her Catholic faith, Rodriguez remembers praying and then feeling a sense of calm. "I said, 'OK, if this is the path I'm supposed to take, let me learn from it.' "
She didn't let her illness affect her business. Neighbors and family helped keep Alchemista running. She dragged an air mattress into her studio, and on days when she was too weak to stand, she walked a teenage neighbor through her product recipes.
"I would lay on the ground and I'd tell him what to do. God bless him, he did it. He was my body," she says.
All this time, her name sat on a waiting list for a new kidney. She went out and looked for one, too, posting a profile on the website Matchingdonors.com
"I'm not a person who can just sit and wait," says Rodriguez. "You have to make things happen."
Two years ago in June - after 4 1/2 years on dialysis - a young woman, who had lost her mother to liver failure and was touched by Rodriguez's story, donated a kidney.
at last, "a full-color life"
The first thing Rodriguez did after surgery was drink a big cup of water.
"It was like waking up to a full-color, Dolby-sound life," she says. "It was black and white before."
But despite the joy of her new life, she needed a push to open a spa that sold Alchemista bath, facial and body products.
"I didn't want to move forward without her, and neither one of us could do what we wanted to do without each other," says Klemann, her friend and business partner.
Instead of launching a mobile business, the two found a storefront with history and character. Klemann would handle the spa, creating custom treatments from products Rodriguez would make.
They tackled the remodeling themselves, crafting a calming space with fresh colors and, of course, that inimitable smell. All the while Rodriguez kept making her bath and body products in the South Fourth Avenue studio that looks half Food Network, half science lab with shelves stacked with beakers and mineral powders as well as agave syrup, vanilla, Hershey's cocoa and baking soda.
Alchemista Aromatherapy Sanctuary & Spa, 6955 N. Oracle Road, opened in September. The lobby sells Rodriguez's products - lotions, soaps, shampoo and conditioner. It's the same stuff many resorts, including Canyon Ranch and Westward Look, use in their spas.
Any new business is a gamble, but Alchemista has a secret weapon, Klemann says.
"We have something that no one else can get anywhere else," she says. "No one else has her."
"Her," of course, is Rodriguez.
Debora Jeppson, an Alchemista massage therapist, says Rodriguez amazes her with her knowledge of essential oils and her desire to help others.
"Helping someone to get better is the most important thing to her," Jeppson says.
No matter the problem, Rodriguez can recommend an essential oil. Restless kids? Try lavender. Allergies getting the better of you? A blend of lavender, peppermint and pine ought to do the trick. Down in the dumps? That's a job for what Rodriguez calls "the heavy hitters": rose, neroli and jasmine, all mood lifters.
Rodriguez doesn't dismiss the power of Western medicine. She herself gulps a potent mix of drugs daily and will for the rest of her life - immunosuppressants, a steroid, blood pressure meds, even pills to control the diabetes she developed as a result of the other meds.
They're keeping her alive, possibly at a cost. Rodriguez says she'll gladly pay it.
"I know the risks," she says. "I know people who died of cancer from the immune-suppressing drugs, but they had those years to live.
"I want to make sure the life I've been given back is done what I love doing."
Contact Kristen Cook at kcook@azstarnet.com or 573-4194.
Read more:
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