Mount Vernon resident Cathy Hufford has mostly recovered from donating her kidney to a person in need, with a surgery completed in late April of this year.
Hufford saw the post from Lisa Christiansen on Facebook in February, even though she didn’t know Christiansen directly.
“I was compelled at that time to see if I could help Lisa,” Hufford said.
In the Facebook post, Christiansen explained that she was in need of a kidney. Christiansen was born with only one kidney. In fall 2021, Christiansen was hospitalized with COVID pneumonia. During that hospitalization, Christiansen had a bowel rupture that went undiagnosed. Christiansen was found to have necrotizing fasciitis, which gave her a 1 percent chance to survive.
Christiansen did, going through a coma and eight different surgeries in the period of a month.
That lead to 10 more surgeries for Christiansen in 2022, including several that required contrast and anesthesia.
“That combination caused my kidney to fail,” Christiansen wrote. “I started dialysis in June 2023.”
For the next several months, Christiansen went through dialysis three times a week for three and a half hours of treatment.
“I’d like my life back,” Christiansen wrote in that original post. “After three years of watching mee recovering and the last year of getting Piper through her own transplant… my family would like our normal life back.”
Christiansen posted that message to her 88 friends in January, in the hope it would reach others who saw it and shared the message with wider social circles.
And that’s how Hufford found the post and clicked on the associated QR code.
Within the next day, Hufford was talking to a living advocate about the process and videos of what donating a kidney would entail.
“When they called back to follow up two days later after receiving that information, I told them I was all-in,” Hufford said.
Hufford said she has down on her own driver’s license that she is an organ and tissue donor after her death, and she signed up with Be the Match in the early 2000s for donating liver, kidneys and bone marrow to any matching donors, but had heard nothing in the 25 years since then.
“When I read Lisa’s post, that was what spurred me to take action,” Hufford said. “I knew I only needed one kidney to live the rest of my life, and this was a way to make a donation that counts earlier in life.”
Hufford and her family were going on vacation for a few weeks in early February, and after Hufford got home in the third week of February, she went in for a blood draw and a urine collection test to make sure her kidneys were functioning properly to proceed down this road.
That was followed by a full day of tests at Loyola University Hospital in Chicago in early March, which went from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
“We went through blood tests, heart tests, CT scans, and then there were meetings with the living donor advocate, dietitian, registered nurse and surgeons during that day,” Hufford said.
Those representatives were her team in this process, and she was assured she could stop at any point of the donation process if things weren’t working for her anymore.
At the end of that round of testing, Hufford had one more test, which was meeting with a psychologist.
In the third week of March, Hufford was noted as a suitable donor for Christiansen.
“I got the call from them on April 1 that I was a definite match for Lisa,” Hufford said. “when they wanted to schedule surgery, I asked if it would be possible before Easter, and they told me that wouldn’t work because of the type of surgery we would be doing.”
Because of Christiansen’s high number of previous surgeries, the donation had to be from a living donor. And that process meant the two would be in separate operating rooms, and the organ would be walked from one room to the other to be placed.
Hufford went in for the surgery on April 30, and was discharged the next day.
“I’ve had ACL and shoulder surgery in the past, and this was nothing compared to those surgeries,” Hufford said. “There were some weight restrictions, due to the incision that I had to follow as the site healed, but it’s had minimal impact on me.”
Christiansen was discharged from Loyola on May 3, her birthday.
And for Hufford, who has not had a health issue that has impacted her life the way it was Christiansen, it was a relief to help someone be able to be off dialysis and living a normal life again.
“There are so many people out there who are still looking for a donor,” Hufford said.
Hufford said more than 20 people had signed up when they read Christiansen’s story to donate an organ, and she was the only one who made it through the process.
“I told Lisa I don’t know if this is divine intervention or not, but finding a match and getting to surgery doesn’t happen this quickly for a lot of people,” Hufford said.
The wait time for most kidney donations is between five to seven years.
And once Hufford had been in the operating room, there had been another person who was potentially waiting if the surgery didn’t go as planned.
“Once they remove an organ, they have 24 hours to transfer to another individual, and I told them if it didn’t work for Lisa, that they should give it to the next person in line,” Hufford said.
Christiansen, in a follow-up post after the surgery, encouraged people who had clicked on her QR code and were rejected because they were not a match to still look into donations in the future.
“I can’t put into words the feeling of going from despair to joy in the space of a day,” Christiansen wrote. “Knowing that good people are willing to give such a gift to save a stranger’s life.”
Christiansen wrote that she was able to find her match in 20 donors was incredible enough, and those willing to donate should consider being a voucher candidate for others or signing up for someone else they know.
“This is a gift I will spend the rest of my life working to deserve and determined to pay forward,” Christiansen wrote.
Hufford and Christiansen will have follow-up appointments this July to see how they are faring.
Hufford said that if people have a kidney they’d consider donating, they should definitely look into it.
“There is a lot of need for donors in the world,” Hufford said. “I know that one of my kidneys is out there now helping someone else live their life.”
