My story begins on June 12th, 1998. My name is Amy and that is the day that changed my life forever. It was a few shorts weeks before my twenty-eighth birthday when it started with some back pain and the thought of passing a kidney stone had run through my mind, you see they tend to run in my family. I decided the pain was debilitating enough that I should head to the emergency room and the story of my rude awakening to my ultimate diagnosis began. It didn’t take them long to do some blood work and find out my kidneys were only functioning at 10% of their capacity.

The week was a whirlwind. I was diagnosed with a disease called IGA Nephropathy. This is a disease that many carry but only few people does it do any real damage to their kidneys. I won the lottery I suppose being one of only a very small percentage, just not the lottery I wanted to win. I spent the week in the hospital with my first surgery coming only the day after I was admitted. I remember getting the grand tour of the dialysis unit and using everything in me not to cry at my fate.

My dialysis treatments started not long after, imagine that, depending on a machine to keep me alive. I spent the next 4 months of my life without too many free moments. Dialysis took 4 hours out of my day just for the process not to mention how drained I was after and that required me to come to the hospital for 3 days a week. My boys had just turned 2 and 4 just the month following my diagnosis and I was still working. I also had to find time for more medical procedures and the testing required to find me an appropriate donor.

My entire family decided to test to be a living donor for me. After some blood work to see how close of a match they are to me they decided to continue testing with my mother. On October 13th of that same year I received my second chance at life from the very person who had given me my first. This is certainly something that wasn’t in her job requirements but she still often reminds me that she would have been hurt had they not picked her.

My story continues, things went great for four years. There were a few episodes of minor things here and there, but life was pretty good. Unfortunately in October 2002 I started having some toxicity to one the anti-rejection drugs and after another biopsy it was determined that my original disease had returned to wreak more havoc on the new kidney. The doctors tried to combat the failure with mega doses of IV steroids but by January of the following year I was back on dialysis.

I continued on dialysis for the next 4 years. Things were pretty bleak. Dialysis definitely takes its toll on your body and mine decided to give it a fight. I was faced with running out of veins when I started having clotting issues. The port they had used before my first transplant was unable to be used again. They placed a port in my other arm and it eventually kept clotting off. I even tried peritoneal dialysis but I was what they called a rapid transporter and it eventually failed for me too.

On top of all of this in October 2005 they found that one of my ovaries had grown to the size of a baseball. They preformed a total hysterectomy and found that I had stage 1 ovarian cancer. Thankfully they caught it in time so I didn’t require further treatment. This also benefitted my wait on the transplant list. Had I needed chemotherapy or other treatment it would have delayed my wait on the list even longer. Then in the early months of 2006 I started having some major problems and my status was changed to urgent on the transplant list. It was discovered that I had Superior Vena Cava Syndrome and they had to stent the arteries in my neck/chest to keep them from closing. This was likely caused from scar tissue that had built up from the many times they had to put in a temporary port.

The testing with my family began once again. My sisters were both still viable candidates for transplant and started testing. We faced a major issue however as I had picked up a new antigen from my mother’s kidney. Both my sisters carried this antigen and my kidney would fight it. In order for me to receive a kidney from them I would have to go through an additional treatment. It would have required a procedure called plasma-pheresis in which they would wipe out my immune system. It would also require approximately six weeks of being in the hospital before the transplant. It was also very expensive and my insurance viewed it as experimental. We were facing a battle when that fateful day came.

I received a call around 2:30am at my job and they informed me that they had not one but two donors available for me and I would get whichever kidney would match me best. I was finally first in line. On July 6, 2006 I received my third chance at life. The feelings were overwhelming as I was sad for the family that had lost someone special in their life and happy that I yet again would receive my chance at life.

Over 2 years have passed and things have been really good. I have written to my donor family several times to thank them for what a wonderful gift they have given me. The words for being thankful never seem like enough as they will probably never be able to grasp how grateful I and my family truly are. They lost so much, but they gave so much. They gave back a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, and they gave me back my hope. I pray that they will find some comfort in knowing all the people their loved one saved. It is an unselfish act that will last a lifetime and longer.