Today I am going to share an amazing story with you....... I have a 36 year old cousin named Jennifer Krouse, we did not grow up together, we barely knew eachother beyond 2-3 childhood visits & a phone call every year or so, but now she is one of my best friends & I love her so much. This is a story about her & how God was working in her life (and mine) even when we didnt know it. Jennifer was born with an extremely rare kidney disease that I cant remember the mile long name for much less spell or pronounce. It really didnt effect her until she became pregnant with her daughter 14 years ago, at which point her kidneys began to fail. She ended up delivering her by emergency c-section due to renal failure at 20something weeks, Jalynn McKenzie Wyatt was barely 2 lbs. After her daughter was born Jennifer began surviving on medication to keep her kidneys barely functioning, a while later they stopped working all together & she went on Dialysis & the transplant list. Eventually they brought machines into her home & she was confined to a clean room & hooked up to these machines 13 hours a day, she tried to do it through the night, but if at some point the alarm on the machine went off the time had to start over. She was a prisoner. After about 5 years of her living this way I called her & told her I wanted to be tested as a living donor. She tried to talk me out of it, my mom FLIPPED out, but I (who had never had surgery in my life) was determined. I began the LONG testing process in Septemberish of 2006 I believe & everything was looking good when they called in December & said they had a cadaver kidney & she was having a transplant that day. Well for the first day or so everything was great but then she began rejecting the kidney. It almost killed her. Multiple times over the next few moths Jennifer almost lost her life, Jalynn almost lost her mother Aunt Pauline almost lost her daughter & I almost lost my best friend. Because of the rejection & her health they stopped testing me, she wouldnt survive another surgery anyway. Besides that her mental state wasnt so great either, she was determined to never go through that again & was content to live out her life in her little room hooked up to her machines. Quite a while (way more than a year later) Jennifer started talking about MAYBE doing another transplant one day. Several months after that her transplant coordinator called & asked if I was still interested in being a donor, I said yes & the testing began again. I had more blood drawn throughout that LONG process than I did with all 4 pregnancies combined, I traveled from our home in NC to Atlanta for very intense testing, psych evals & every doctor I met tried to convince me why I should not do this (they were testing me). 5 years ago today, 3 years after the testing began we got the call that I was a PERFECT match & Jennifer was ready for another surgery. We scheduled it for August 23, 2009 (I will never forget that date). Everything was on schedule, I was having weekly blood drawn & all was well, when the week before the surgery I received a call saying that Jennifer had developed antibodies to my blood, If I gave her my kidney it would kill her. I was crushed, she was ok with it but I was devastated, I wanted this to all be over for her. Less than a month later I got a call from her saying she was on her way to Atlanta, they had found another cadaver kidney, I jumped in my car & made it to the hospital while she was in surgery. When they brought her back to the room she was greeted with my smiling face. I stayed with her in the hospital for several days, got her hooked on candy corns & took pictures of her the first time she went to the bathroom (hey it was the first time shed gone in YEARS). The doctors said that her disease will attack this kidney also & she will have to have another transplant one day but for now she is happy, healthy & alive. They also said it is good she developed those antibodies because over time they can & probably will go away & when she needs another kidney we already know Im a match. This yearin September we get to celebrate her 5 year KIDNEYVERSARY! I am so amazed at how God had his hand in all of this & so thankful to him for taking care of Jennifer. This true story is my constant reminder that Gods timing is perfect.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 14:33:08 +0000
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