Transplant Scheduled for Katie!

Time to fire up the blog again! Over the next week, I'll try to catch you up on some of the highlights from the last 7 weeks, but the exciting news for this post is that Katie has a donor and is scheduled to have her kidney transplant on April 16th!

Katie’s donor is a wonderful young woman named Kelly. We had the pleasure of meeting Kelly and her mom for the first time on February 26th when they came for dinner after a long day of testing at the hospital. Kelly lives in Massachusetts. She offered to donate her kidney after hearing about Katie’s need. We are unspeakably grateful to Kelly. Please pray that we might be able to minister to Kelly and her family as she makes sacrifices to give this incredible gift!

Katie and her amazing donor Kelly

Katie was originally scheduled to have both her kidneys removed on March 19th (a bilateral nephrectomy), giving her 4 weeks to recover before the transplant on April 16th. Unfortunately, she got a serious infection in her dialysis catheter and the nephrectomy had to be cancelled. On Friday, March 21st, after her dialysis session, her catheter was removed. She was tubeless over the Easter weekend (and for her 21st birthday!) and had a new catheter put in on Monday, March 24th, before having dialysis again. Katie is finishing up a course of antibiotics.

The nephrectomy has been rescheduled for April 14th. Katie will get to “recover” on the 15th and then get wheeled back into the OR for the transplant on the 16th. It is a less-than-ideal plan, but the docs have decided it is the best one given all the factors. They feel that combining the double nephrectomy and the transplant into one surgery would just be too long and risky.

Please join us in praying for an uncomplicated, uneventful transplant experience for both Katie and Kelly.