Celebrating sister’s kidney donation 40 years later

by Craig Bradford of The Aylmer Express

Mary Ann Crossett, 65, of Aylmer, from the close-knit DeAngelis family of Belmont, carries her sister Margaret Reardon especially close to her heart – kidney actually.

Margaret donated one of her kidneys to her sister and the two and their extended families have just celebrated the 40th anniversary of that gesture – a literal gift of life. The family marked the anniversary of the organ donation and transplant surgery on Nov. 19.

“I’ve been very healthy and so has my sister, thank God!” Ms. Crossett said.

Although healthy for the most part, Margaret, 61, in recent years has developed early onset Alzheimer’s Disease and lives in a retirement home with her husband.

“I was 25 and she was 21,” Ms. Crossett, 65, said on Friday, Nov. 20. “We talked yesterday and we said to each other, what were we thinking! She was only 21! I guess we were thinking if I was going to live I needed a kidney!”

Problems with her kidneys first became known when Ms. Crossett was 16, the age she had her first surgery.

A birth defect resulted in her needing to have the ureters, the tubes that lead from the kidneys to the bladder, re-implanted.

Until that point in her life, she had not experienced any pain or anything unusual with her kidneys. But over time with no connection to her bladder, urine would not be able to leave her body and ended up back in her kidneys which caused them to develop chronic nephritis, or inflammation of the kidneys.

“Diet pills”

Her condition wasn’t discovered until she visited a doctor to acquire “diet pills” or amphetamines, otherwise known as “speed.” At the time in the mid-1960s, amphetamines were commonly prescribed as diet pills by family doctors before the drug’s addictive and negative side effects became more apparent with wider use (and misuse).

Ms. Crossett’s older brothers had been prescribed the same diet pills and part of the process in acquiring them was for the doctor to take a urine sample.

When the test results came back, it was discovered she had protein in her urine, a sign that something was wrong with her kidneys.

“He gave me speed anyway!” Ms. Crossett said.

She had the ureters reinsertion surgery that summer.

“I thought I was fine after that,” she recalled.

Her life progressed after that about as normal as many others. She graduated high school, attended teacher’s college and started teaching full time. She also married Brian Crossett and had two children “close together” at age 19 and 20: Julie Ann and Joe.

“If they (medical professionals she encountered) warned me that having children would be dangerous, I didn’t hear them,” Ms. Crossett said. Having children damaged her kidneys further and they both eventually failed in late 1974 and early 1975.

“Shut down”

“They absolutely shut down,” she said. “The one thing I remember was one night it was very frightening. I couldn’t breathe late one night.”

She was sent to St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital by Dr. Duncan Sinclair for tests and not long after a specialist discovered she had experienced kidney failure. She was then taken by ambulance to London’s old Victoria Hospital. She saw another doctor there who asked her if she had anything to eat that day. The answer was yes.

“Surgery will be difficult today,” she remembered him remarking to which she thought: “Oh, I am getting surgery today?”

That procedure was inserting a shunt in her ankle so she could begin kidney dialysis.

“I woke up to alarms,” she said. “My ankle hurt like heck. If I moved too much, it set off alarms. I had never heard of dialysis before that time.”

The shunt was only a short term arrangement so the next procedure she endured was having a fistula put into her right arm which joined a vein and an artery to a dialysis machine. The fistula worked at first but it didn’t heal as it should have and ended up not working as well as expected for dialysis.

Following that she had a “bovine” or calf vein inserted in her arm. She said a bovine could withstand the large needles for dialysis better than human veins.

“The bovine worked beautifully,” she said.

Dialysis

Most of that surgery was done in the summer of 1975 and she had been having dialysis treatment twice a week since the March prior at old Victoria Hospital. She was also put on the ‘cadaver transplant list.”

Each dialysis treatment took six hours and she remembered the long drive to London from her home in Aylmer and back again. Often times she would be driving home in the middle of the night and have to wake up early the next morning to teach at Assumption Catholic Elementary School. “You never feel well while on dialysis.”

She then had surgery to remove the shunt from her ankle.

There were a lot of other patients ahead of her on the cadaver transplant list and she was told not to ask her siblings to be donors as it “puts undo pressure on them.”

“Thankful”

“I ignored them and asked every last one of them!” she said. “I was never so thankful to have five brothers and sisters.”

In the summer of that year of the transplant, her younger brother Emmett offered and was tested for transplant compatibility. He wasn’t a match – at all. “Dr. Stiller took his blood and said, nope, won’t work, nothing is the same between you two!” Ms. Crossett recalled him saying.

Her sister Margaret offered to be tested next and she was a good match.

“We were told the only way it would be a better match was if we were identical twins,” she said.

Ms. Reardon was put through a week-long series of tests in early October 1975 to make sure one of her kidneys would fit properly. Everything came back positive and the surgery was scheduled for Nov. 19. The sisters entered University Hospital in London two days before the transplant surgery.

“It was almost an adventure for her,” Ms. Crossett said. “She had only been in the hospital to have her two children before that. It wasn’t new to me.”

University Hospital was “state of the art” at that time and she remembers that the floors were carpeted.

Didn’t listen

The medical staff at University Hospital hadn’t any experience with her specific needs for dialysis and didn’t listen to Ms. Crossett when she told them they didn’t give her enough blood thinner. Her blood clotted in the dialysis machine which resulted in her losing quite a lot of blood. She had to be given two blood transfusions in her room.

Then at dawn on Nov. 19, her sister Margaret was prepped for the surgery to remove one of her kidneys. “I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown,” Ms. Crossett said. “I knew what was happening but she had no idea.”

Their parents had arrived but Ms. Crossett’s husband Brian had not as he “didn’t handle hospitals well.” He checked in constantly by telephone to see how his wife and sister-in-law were doing.

Two nurses who had cared for her from Victoria Hospital came by that day. Organ transplants were still relatively new in the medical community back then.

Comforting

“It was very comforting to me,” Ms. Crossett said to see those two nurses.

The big worry after the surgery was infection as the anti-rejection drugs caused the immune system to be “turned down.”

Ms. Crossett’s mother, Jean DeAngelis said to her she would never forget the difference in her daughter’s skin right after the transplant was performed. She had pink skin instead of the yellow complexion from living with kidney disease all those years.

In recovery after the surgery, Ms. Crossett recalled sleeping for a bit but when she woke up, she felt “so good,” both physically but probably even more so emotionally.

Her husband soon came to visit and she remembered he looked “ridiculous” in a full medical gown, hat, booties and mittens.

“I was sitting up in bed and got up out of bed shortly after that,” she remembered. “I felt so good.”

She wanted to see her sister so badly but couldn’t so she called her on a telephone.

“Her surgery was so much worse than mine,” she said. She explained that while the transplant went in through the front of her body, the kidney was extracted through her sister’s back which involved cutting through a whole different set of muscles needed for a wider array of body movement.

Ms. Crossett was allowed to go home for a weekend after the second week in hospital following the surgery.

“I thought I died and had gone to heaven,” she said.

But on top of her transplant surgery, it was not a pleasant time for the family. Her father Art was very ill after experiencing a major stroke which had left him blind. He came to visit her and that was the last time she saw her father before he died. Her father died Dec. 18, the day after she was released from the hospital for good. While her father couldn’t visit her in the hospital, he would call every day.

“Raise hell!”

“We were quite close,” she said. “They took blood every day and sometimes I would be upset about it and start crying. My dad would call the doctor and raise hell with them!”

Once home in Aylmer, she remembered the entire family coming to visit and her mother-in-law cooking all day long for everyone. She was the only one of her immediate family living in Aylmer and the Crossett home became the meeting place.

Ms. Crossett was working part-time at Assumption with fellow teacher Peggy David in the music department before her transplant surgery. She remembered her friends Judy Mennill and Brenda Odanski coming over and helping put food out for everyone.

No complaints

She had to travel back and forth to University Hospital in London from Aylmer every day for blood tests for several weeks after the transplant and her younger brother John, 20 at the time and living in Belmont, volunteered for the duty with “no complaints, no questions,” Ms. Crossett said.

She returned to teaching at Assumption part-time at the beginning of February for the rest of the school year with Mrs. David. “I was almost out of sick days!” she said.

Pneumonia returned in April but she was better able to fight off illness by then and wasn’t hospitalized.

She said the biggest change in her life from before her transplant surgery to now was how much less medicine she had to take. “Back then, I carried a bag with me when on dialysis and was taking 16 pills a day,” she said. “Now I take three pills a day.” She will have to take anti-rejection medicine for the rest of her life. “Oh, yes, forever,” she said. “The doctors explained my body will never accept it (her sister’s kidney) totally. I’m not sure I believe that.”

“My health has been excellent,” she continued. “I maybe missed two or three days a year of work when I went back full-time.”

She retired from teaching in 2006 after a 35-year career, most of that at Assumption but with the final nine years at St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in St. Thomas.

Her husband Brian died in 1997.

While she couldn’t confirm she was the first transplant recipient from Aylmer, she knows that back then it was big news in her community. “People are still amazed,” she said when people found out she had a kidney transplant.

She sent out a message on Facebook to remind her sister they were celebrating the 40th anniversary of the transplant surgery.

While her sister Margaret has advanced dementia now, they still enjoy each other’s company.

“Yesterday when we were out, she is like a child,” Ms. Crossett said. “She knew what we were doing.”

The sisters used to give each other gifts each year on the anniversary of the transplant surgery, a highlight being a kidney shaped pendant made of gold on the 10th anniversary, but they stopped some time ago. “The gift you gave me can’t come close to any other gift we can give each other anymore,” she recalled telling her sister.

Ms. Crossett has five granddaughters ranging in ages from 10 to 24. Her sister Margaret has two grandchildren, ages 3 and 5, who live in Toronto.

“Always there”

“The support I have had from family and siblings – it has been great,” she said. “It has always been there.”

“My mom says on every anniversary (of the transplant surgery) that someone should call the newspaper,” she continued. “I can only imagine what they (her parents) were thinking. Our only two daughters in surgery. One to save the other.”

Her son Joe likes statistics and asks every year if his mother is the longest living transplant recipient and his aunt the longest living donor that had surgery at University Hospital in London.

“A nurse said no, there are at least two others,” she said. “I guess 1975 was a big year for transplants for University Hospital. There were two other earlier transplants in April and either September or October. We aren’t the first but we intend to be the longest at some point!”