Lauren A. Hickman has a fulfilling schedule as an associate minister and administrative assistant to the senior pastor at West Side Missionary Baptist Church, after receiving a new kidney in May 2013.
Preceding the transplant was 11 years of dialysis for End Stage Renal Disease, due to kidney failure that was the result of uncontrolled high blood pressure.
Hickman said he first learned he had hypertension as a teenager, but was not prescribed medication until he was in his 20s.
“I believe that mostly because of my age and me not taking my health seriously, I didn’t understand the ramifications of me not taking my blood pressure medication,” Hickman said.
Once he was prescribed medication, Hickman explained, “At that time, they really tried to stress to me that it’s really important that you take this medicine. ‘If you don’t take your medicine it can lead to kidney failure.’”
When he heard that, Hickman said he straightened up and flew right for a little bit, but fell back into not taking his medicine as prescribed.
“Foolishness,” is how he now describes his not wanting to be proactive in his health, although at the time he was not really feeling very good or bad – just “blah,” frequent fatigue, but something he couldn’t pinpoint.
“In the back of my head I kind of knew what it was,” he said.
We all realize there is never a convenient time to get sick. Hickman was across the country in Rand, West Virginia, chaperoning a youth mission trip, when the uncontrolled HBP caught up with him.
“That was July 18, 2002. Honestly, I wasn’t feeling good when I left and in the back of my head, I hadn’t been taking my medication. And on the third day of that trip, I just told them I needed to go to the hospital, something is going on,” Hickman said.
What was actually going on – his kidneys were shutting down. Hickman was taken to a hospital in Charleston, West Virginia.
“One of the first thing they did was to test my creatinine levels and when they did that, they knew immediately I was in End Stage Renal Failure and I was receiving my first dialysis treatment, probably three hours later,” he said.
Creatinine is a chemical waste product of creatine, a chemical produced in the body to supply energy to the muscles. Creatinine is removed from the body through the kidneys. When the kidneys are not functioning properly, creatinine levels in the bloodstream elevate because they it is not being eliminated through urine.
Hickman spent 14 days in the hospital, the first nine in the intensive care unit.
“During that hospital stay, a lot of what went through my mind was, why didn’t I take my health seriously than I had in times before,” he said. “If I had I wouldn’t have found myself in the condition that I was in.”
Regret was quickly replaced by faith and encouragement from loved ones and friends.
Another chaperone on the trip stayed with him in West Virginia until he could travel back to St. Louis, where his dialysis center was already selected, contacted and treatment set up before arriving home.
For many years, the three days-per-week of dialysis were doing the job, but eventually, time away from family and friends was taking too big of a chunk out of his quality of life.
“These six hours, three days-a-week that I am spending, there are other things I could do with that time,” Hickman said. When traveling to see family, friends or to attend an event, at some point Hickman knew he always had to stop at some point to dialysis treatment.
After his kidney transplant last year and a problem-free recovery, attributed in part to plenty of family support, Hickman’s lifestyle is that of a healthy transplant recipient.
“I do have a medicine regime that I will be on for the rest of my life. There are anti-rejection drugs that I take daily and then part of my medication routine is for blood pressure, but I’ve probably never been on such a low dosage before,” Hickman said.
“Now that I have a healthy functioning kidney, when I left the hospital they told me there were three things that I would never be able to eat, and those three things are grapefruit, pomegranate and star fruit.
I don’t eat that stuff anyway.”
They would go against his anti-rejection drugs.
Find out more about organ and tissue donation from Mid America Transplant Services at https://www.mts-stl.org.
