Agnes Rusan of St. Louis didn’t want to get her hopes up when she got an 11 p.m. telephone call on the night of April 14, 2011 that a kidney may be available and she needed to get to the hospital by midnight. After all, this would be the second such call for her, but the donor kidney that became available a few months earlier ultimately went to someone else.
Rusan had been undergoing home dialysis since 2006 for kidney failure due to uncontrolled high blood pressure (see Your Health Matters, St. Louis American, March 17, 2011).
Including final testing for compatibility, Rusan said it took about 10 hours before she knew that this time, the antigens, tissue typing and serum crossmatch were all in her favor.
“They always call three people for every one kidney,” Rusan said. “That way, if I don’t work out or the second person – at least someone can get that kidney.”
A spokeswoman at Barnes-Jewish Hospital said contacting two people for one kidney is usually the norm. In case someone else is a stronger match and, with so few donated organs, they don’t want the donated kidney to go to waste.
“The operation took about five hours,” she said. For the first couple of days, she remembers being in pain at the incision site and feeling “out of it.”
“The kidney didn’t react right away but on the third day, it started kick-jumping up,” Rusan said.
Shortly after being released from a four or five day hospital stay, a spike in blood sugar sent her back to the hospital for another week. Rusan said she never had diabetes until she started dialysis.
“I had controlled blood sugar problems before, but with the medicine I had to take for the transplant not to reject, it was prednisone that induced my blood sugar,” Rusan explained.
She couldn’t eat anything when she came home from the hospital, and her regular liquid diet was the issue.
“They said I could have orange juice, cranberry juice and apple juice, but I didn’t know I was supposed to have sugar-free. So I just had all the wrong stuff,” Rusan said. “When I got back to the hospital they taught me the blood sugar diet and I’m on the blood sugar diet right now.”
With her blood sugar again under control with insulin injections, she looked ahead to recovery and feeling better.
“The Saturday before Mothers’ Day, I was able to eat – my taste came back and I was able to eat, and when I started eating, I started getting my strength back,” she said.
“It was a long process — It was about a month-and-a-half.”
In addition to taking insulin, high blood pressure medicine and daily anti-rejection medications, Rusan’s kidney healthy regime today consists of regular exercise, baked foods, drinking lots of water, diet soda on occasion and ixnay on the processed stuff.
“I went back to work in July and then I started walking every morning before work – and that helps,” she said.
Her coworkers noticed a big difference.
“They were amazed at how I look, because dialysis makes you really dark and a charcoal kind-of-like color and my color came back and I may have had a glow,” she said. “Everyone said I looked really good.”
Rusan is thankful her donated kidney and for the love and support of her family, friends, and to all who cared for her at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, where she said she got the royal treatment.
“The transplant staff, along with the nurses and aids; to the food man who brought me my food and the cleaning people, I was treated like a queen – I have never been treated like I was treated – they were all so great,” Rusan described.
“They got it going on over there – they were all so caring and nice. You know how sometimes you can go to a hospital and feel like they don’t really care? I never got that feeling there.”
