Overcoming obstacles on way to kidney donation
Conroe couple had to deal with heart surgery, chemo and COVID-19 before she could give organ to him
“Compatible” is normally too mild a word to describe Kris and Michael McBride of Conroe, but the couple were thrilled to hear it. “Compatible” meant that when the lab mixed test tubes of their blood, her proteins didn’t rile his immune cells. “Compatible” meant that Kris could give Michael the kidney he needed.
It was good luck, pure and simple. And in the two and a half years that Michael waited for a kidney, it would be the last good luck they’d see for a while.
Their first transplant date was canceled because Michael needed triple-bypass surgery. Their second because Kris needed chemo for breast cancer.
Then came COVID-19. Twice.
Mr. Dynamic
Kris met Michael in 1985 at a networking group for small-business owners. She did accounting; he owned a delivery service. She thought of him as “Mr. Dynamic” — a guy not afraid of anything, even charging bulls. (Literally: At the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, he volunteered as a rodeo clown.)
They started dating in ’91, and were married in ’95. Friends thought of them as a unit: KrisAndMichael, always together.
In 2014, Michael had a stroke. It went through him, Kris says, “like a lightning bolt,” and the damage included his kidneys. At the beginning of 2018, when his kidney function dropped below 20 percent, his nephrologist referred him to Houston Methodist’s transplant center.
At Methodist, per protocol, Kris and Michael were assigned to two transplant teams: donor and recipient. Usually, the donor’s team doesn’t even talk to the recipient’s team. “We have to protect the kidney donors,” explains Hassan Ibrahim, Kris’ doctor, chief of kidney diseases at Houston Methodist. “This is a surgery that they don’t need.”
Ibrahim goes so far as to recommend a cooling-off period, so that donors don’t rush into a surgery they’ll regret. He makes sure they understand that their would-be recipient has other options, such as dialysis or going on the waiting list for a kidney. If they still want to go through with it, they’re put through a battery of tests, to make sure their health won’t suffer.
Kris’ team said that to be healthy enough to donate, she’d have to lose weight. The next day, she enrolled in Memorial’s weight-loss program. Six months later, she’d lost 60 pounds.
By December, Kris and Michael met their teams’ criteria to set a surgery date and began intensive pre-operation tests. Michael’s heart test was one of the last. Kris dropped Michael off for the test and left, thinking it would take a long time. Only 30 minutes later, the office called to say it was done.
“That was easy!” she thought. But when she pulled the hos
pital curtain back, her husband was pale and teary. “No transplant for me,” he said. The test had revealed a serious blockage. He needed a triple bypass.
The blockage had been totally asymptomatic. Had the screening not uncovered it in time, Michael might have died.
‘My life fell apart’
It took months for Michael to heal from the bypass. In June 2019, they were ready to try the transplant again. As part of pre-op testing, Kris had a mammogram. Two days later, the lab called with bad news.
Kris’ oncologist told her not to worry, that they’d caught the cancer early, that it was only a few nodules, that they could fast-track Kris’ lumpectomy and radiation treatments.
Kris called her transplant team: “This will only delay us by a few months, right?”
No, they told her. Normal protocol dictated waiting a matter of years. One person told her five years; another, 10.
“My life fell apart,” Kris remembers. “I wasn’t going to be able to donate, and without a new kidney, Michael wouldn’t make it.”
He was steadily growing weaker. By August, his kidney function was around 8 or 9 percent. He felt terrible, had no energy, and, finally, went on dialysis: — move he’d delayed as long as he could.
He chose peritoneal dialysis, a variety that’s better for people who hope to receive a transplant but is extremely hard to live with. He had to stay hooked to the noisy machine for nine hours a night, seven nights a week, with a tether barely long enough to let him reach the bathroom. He slept in a chair, and even so, sometimes dislodged a needle or kinked a hose, setting off alarms.
Friends and family stepped up to donate, but one after one, they failed the screenings.
Cinco de Mayo
On March 6, Kris’ phone rang. Her transplant team coordinator, Michelle Millender, said, “Chris, I hope you’re sitting down.”
Frustrated when yet another would-be donor failed the screening, Dr. Ibrahim had asked to review Kris’ file. Her cancer, he saw, wasn’t a type that was likely to return or spread, and Kris was in great health. The risk to his patient seemed minimal, and the benefit to her life, great.
Without letting Kris know, he took the matter to Methodist’s review committee.
Millender was calling with the good news that the committee had agreed: Kris could donate the kidney Michael needed.
They quickly set a date: May 5. Michael managed a joke. “Cinco de Mayo! With that new kidney, I can have a margarita.”
It was not to be. COVID-19 arrived in Houston in mid-March. Shutdown orders allowed hospitals to do transplants, but Methodist opted to delay those involving live donors. Besides freeing up beds and staff in case of a potential surge in COVID-19 cases, doctors didn’t know what to expect from the new coronavirus. They didn’t want to put kidney donors and recipients at risk.
In mid-May, when Methodist started transplants again, Kris and Michael were at the top of the list. Only a few last-minute tests stood in their way, and the McBrides didn’t worry at all about the COVID-19 test. After all, they hardly went anywhere, didn’t know anyone who’d been infected and felt fine.
But on April 29, Millender called Kris in tears. The COVID-19 test was positive.
Kris suspected that the test had misfired, but a second test came back positive, too. For the next two weeks, while Kris quarantined at home, Michael left food outside her door. Somehow, he never caught the virus.
They were cleared for surgery as soon as Kris got out of quarantine. And finally, on Friday, May 29 — the third date in May that the McBrides hat attempted to schedule surgery — everything went right. Michael at last received Kris’ kidney. Right on the operating table, as soon as the organ was hooked up, it started producing urine, says Dr. Ibrahim — a sign of success.
The following Wednesday, Michael was able to walk a mile. “I didn’t realize how bad
I’d felt before,” he says.
Kidney donation is usually far harder on the donor than on the recipient, but Kris breezed through it: only a little soreness, a few stitches, no pain that a Tylenol can’t handle.
“I know I’m supposed to feel bad, to be tired, but I’m not,” she says. “Maybe I’m so grateful, that overpowers it.”