Second chance
Former coach receives kidney
Kawika Keator is lucky to be alive, and no one knows it more than him.
After 13 years on dialysis for kidney disease and triple-bypass open heart surgery in May 2019, the 46-year-old former Baldwin High School girls soccer head coach received a kidney on July 11. And, after a few tense days, it is functioning well.
“It was a crazy 13 years, man,” Keator said Tuesday. “I feel so blessed now to have this second shot, second shot at life.”
Keator coached the Bears from 1999 to 2012, winning nine Maui Interscholastic League crowns and state championships in 2000 and 2001. The state titles are still the only two ever won by a Neighbor Island soccer team at the girls Division I level.
He balked at the idea of being sick when he was first told by doctors of the developing kidney disease in 2006.
“A year later, that’s when I started getting sick and having all the symptoms and I went all the way until the end of the (2007) season, I didn’t want to leave my team in the middle of the season,” he said. “I was pretty much almost dead already.”
A check of his Blood Urea Nitrogen
(BUN) toxin levels left the doctor on Oahu stunned.
“Normal BUN is like 7 to 23 is the number you look for,” Keator said. “My BUN was 329. The nephrologist told me, ‘Hey, I’ve been a doctor for 40 years and in 40 years I’ve never seen anyone with a BUN that high and still alive.’ He told me, ‘You should have been dead, like, three months ago.’ ”
His life changed this summer, but not without another major detour.
“I kind of got kicked off the (transplant) list for a little while because I didn’t finish all the requirements that I had to do,” said Keator, who returned to his job as social studies teacher at Baldwin on Sept. 8. “I had to get myself back on the list, and I finally did, like, a week before they called me. When they told me that I got back on the list, they said ‘might be about three months,’ but then they called me a week after.”
The deceased donor was named Ryan Kaleo Higa. Higa’s sister reached out to a friend of Paul Keator, Kawika’s father, asking if they had any family members who needed an organ.
That led to Kawika Keator’s new kidney and the end to nine hours of overnight dialysis every day since being told that he needed the treatment in 2007.
“I got the transplant and I didn’t have to be hooked up to anything — that was just an awesome feeling,”
Keator said. “It was definitely weird at first because that tube was just like a part of me.”
Nicole Garbin Toeaina was one of the stars of the Baldwin state championship teams before a career at the University of Oregon.
“It’s got to feel like a long time coming for him, probably having to change his whole life just to stay alive, just fight for his life,” Toeaina said. “He had to make a lot of changes along the way, so it’s just great to hear that he got what he’s been waiting for.”
A usual stay in the hospital following the transplant surgery is a week, but after a week the new organ wasn’t quite working, so doctors ordered a biopsy.
“The day I was supposed to do the biopsy, brah, the kidney just went kick in,” Keator said. “It started to work and then every day it just got better and better.”
Four days later, he left the hospital but remained on Oahu for a month for post-op appointments, tests and bloodwork to make sure things were proceeding well and to balance his medication.
He arrived back on Maui on Aug. 18, went through 14 days of quarantine and resumed his Baldwin teaching career two weeks ago.
Keator acknowledged that his own mistake got him kicked off the transplant list, only to find his way back on to it just in time.
“Every year you have to do all these different things — you have to do a stress test every year, chest X-ray, you have to get the OK from your dentist. You have to pass all these different things,” he said. “There was this point where I had to take care of something, a family thing, so I ended up not doing one of the things, so they bumped me off the list — I didn’t get the stress test done in time.”
That actually turned out to be a lifesaving mistake.
“When I tried to get back on the list, when I did the stress test, they found something was wrong, so I ended up having bypass heart surgery,” Keator said. “I had to do that before I could even get back on the list.”
His daughters McKenzie, 21, and Bailey, 19; parents Paul and Sheri; and grandson Aiden, 5, are all grateful. Kawika Keator and his daughters have lived most of the last 13 years with his parents.
Keator’s bottom-line message is simple.
“Make sure you go to the doctor,” he said. “I was always an athlete and I always thought, ‘Nah, it’ll just go away,’ but no. My thing now is, if anything’s wrong with me I always go to the doctor.”
Robert Collias is at rcollias @mauinews.com