‘Kenny is such a fighter’
AFTER DOUBLE LUNG TRANSPLANT, GULF WAR VETERAN RETURNS TO RUNNING
Kenny Douglas used to dream about his last race during the darkest period of his illness, when the walls were closing in, when his muscles had withered away to nothing and his ruined lungs were in such advanced decline that the simple act of standing left him gasping for air.
In the dream, Douglas would be running fast and breathing easy, barrelling down a Welsh mountainside as a competitor in a 32-km race in Wales' Snowdonia National Park.
It was the first Saturday of June 1996. Douglas was an army captain with the Royal Scots regiment, a veteran of the First Gulf War and in his 20s, in peak form.
“That race would come to me in my dreams when I was really struggling,” Douglas says from his Ottawa home. “I would have that feeling when you are a runner — when you get to that happy state — and you are just cruising.
“It would take a few seconds after I woke up to realize that it was only a dream.”
Sally Douglas refers to her husband as Kenny D. She, in turn, is Sally D. to all who know her well.
Both are Scots. They met 22 years ago at a wedding in the south of England and married two years later.
Kenny first noticed something was amiss with his health during their honeymoon in Italy. He went for a run one day in Florence and felt tightness in his chest. He attributed it to the heat.
Back in Scotland, he felt something more while walking home from a rugby game. He couldn't catch his breath. Doctors were confounded. Kenny was a soldier and looked the part — all muscle and no fat.
He was given puffers, but not answers. A closer examination revealed he had pulmonary fibrosis — a scarring of his lungs. Doctors ultimately blamed the scarring on environmental toxins to which he was exposed during the Gulf War.
It progressed rapidly. Kenny couldn't run. It felt as though he were living at the top of Mount Everest: every breath took effort. There was never enough air.
But Kenny D. and Sally D. kept going. They had a son, Lachlan, and another, Jock. They moved to Canada in 2004. In 2006 they decided to stay for good.
“Kenny is such a fighter,” Sally says. “He would make breakfast for the kids every morning. We had chairs positioned all over the house because more than a couple steps became too much for him. So he would sit by the cooker, get up, whisk the eggs, sit down, catch his breath, get up and put the eggs in the pan — it was laborious.
“It would have been so easy for him to say, 'You know what, I am not going to do breakfast anymore.' But every little piece he gave up, whether it was accepting that he needed a chair in the shower — or a wheelchair, which was big — but he would push and push and push until he knew that he had to move the marker.”
Kenny underwent a double lung transplant at Toronto General Hospital in July 2015. On the day of the surgery, Sally received an email from Kenny's close friends. Every Friday, Kenny and the “boys” met for breakfast at the Vanier Grill on Ottawa's Montreal Road. On that Friday, the “boys” sent Sally a photo of themselves at the restaurant holding a sign: “Go Kenny.”
Go Kenny went viral. Stephen Harper, New Zealand's All Blacks squad — even actor Ewan McGregor held a Go Kenny sign, snapped a photo and passed it along.
He died on the operating table, was brought back by the surgeons and went into arrest several more times in the first days after the surgery. After 20 days, he emerged from a coma and peered around his room.
“I spent days looking at those pictures, piecing things together,” he says. “It had an extraordinary effect on me.”
His story isn't one he would naturally seek to tell. But he and Sally are telling it now, because Kenny is proof of what organ donation means. Almost 300 Canadians died waiting for a transplant in 2014. Only 30 per cent of Ontarians are registered as donors. It takes two minutes to fill out the form and potentially save a life.
“My wife — my kids: had it not been for somebody giving up their organs they would have buried their dad. That is where we were in this.”
Now Kenny D. is here, in Ottawa, on a drizzly Sunday morning, tearing apart a deck with his teenagers two weeks out from running his first race — a 10K — in 20 years.
His goal was to run, period, post-transplant. “I still dream about that Wales race,” Kenny says. “Here, out on the trails, I'll get the nod from the other runners. I'll just be out, plodding along — but to just be out is such a wonderful feeling.
“It is the most fantastic feeling in the world.”
MY WIFE, MY KIDS — HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR SOMEBODY GIVING UP THEIR ORGANS, THEY WOULD HAVE BURIED THEIR DAD. — KENNY DOUGLAS