Mom’s kidney failure came out of the blue

The journey began in February of 2012. Regina felt something was not right. She itched. Her ankles were swollen. She had no appetite, even for her favorite foods. Her three children knew something was wrong when she couldn’t make it to watch one of their basketball games.

She saw her doctor on a Thursday and expected test results the following day. There was a brief sense of relief as Friday progressed. However, a call on her drive home from work from Nashville to Clarksville, Tenn. was not good. Regina needed to pull over to gather herself. She was in complete kidney failure. She saw a specialist on Saturday and had surgery to remove both organs following the weekend. Just days had passed and she was on an operating table.

The cause of the failure was uncontrolled high blood pressure. It’s a condition Regina laments to this day — how something so simple could lead to such an urgent situation. The kidney specialist explained the stages of failure, 1 through 5. Regina was past stage 5.

“It was something simple that if I had just known,” Regina said. “I thought it was me being a single mother, working with kids, a hectic life.”

Alex and Alexis were in high school and Alyssa was in middle school. There was brief thought that one of the children could donate a kidney then. However, there were some circumstances that would prevent such a grand gesture at the time and Regina was hesitant to put her children through such an ordeal.

For the first two months, Regina had hemodialysis, where she went to a hospital three days a week for four hours at a time for the treatment. She changed to peritoneal dialysis, which allowed for the treatment to be done with a machine at home. The process took nine hours each day hooked to the machine with bags of medicine that weighed up to 45 pounds.

As life went on, Alex and Alexis left for college. Much of the responsibility to help Regina at home fell to Alyssa and to her parents, Betty and James Odom, to get her to doctor appointments and other errands. Regina marvels at the help she received and the sacrifices made by others.

“For me, it was hard to watch because I saw her more when she was sick, very tired and weak,” said Alyssa, now a sophomore at Middle Tennessee State majoring in nutrition. She would like to eventually focus on renal care. “There were times I had to cancel plans and make my life revolve around her and focus on her. It was challenging at first. But she’s my mom and I knew she didn’t deserve to get sick. She is such a good person. It was never a burden to me.”