CULLEN, GABRIELLE AND CHRISTINE WALKER relax in their home nearly a month after Cullen received a kidney transplant at Maine Medical Center.
Cullen Walker’s family has a tough history with kidney health.
His father and grandfather both dealt with the decline and eventual failure of organs that continuously strain the body’s blood and remove waste from its circulatory systems. Cullen’s own kidneys began to falter when the Phippsburg man was in his mid-20s and, four years ago, he began making thrice-weekly trips to Coastal Dialysis in Bath where machines did the filtering for him.
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, after working his full-time job as warehouse manager for an office supply company, Walker would sit for five-and-a-half hours connected to machines that performed the human equivalent of an oil change.
Fifteen hours a week, 52 weeks a year, adds up to 32 days of total time — an entire month every year spent away from his wife, Christine, and their daughter, Gabrielle, who’s now 7.
“That was the hardest thing about it, was the time,” Walker said, gesturing toward his wife and daughter. “It was time I could’ve spent with them.”
Everything changed on Dec. 2.
Shortly after 12:30 a.m., Walker and his wife, Christine, got the call they’d waited for since 2009: Maine Medical Center’s transplant division had a healthy donor kidney, and how soon could they be at the Portland hospital?
By 2 a.m., one of Gabrielle’s grandparents had arrived to stay with her and the Walkers were on their way to Portland. By 3:30 a.m., Cullen was being prepared for the transplant; 17 hours later he was in the renal recovery unit with his new kidney. It started producing urine almost immediately and, a couple days later, began filtering Walker’s blood.
Both are vital keys to the body’s acceptance of the tissue and indicators that the procedure ultimately will be a success, according to Mary Biggar, a pre-transplant coordinator at Maine Medical Center.
Successful transplants are measured by how many patients are alive and how many have working transplanted kidneys a year after the initial procedure, Biggar said.
Maine Medical Center’s most recent ranking was 2011, when it carried a 95-percent survival rate and 90 percent of the transplants it conducted proved successful.
MMC does 40 to 60 transplants each year. Scheduling and organ matching can be nightmarishly complex. But, Biggar said, when the pieces fall just right and a patient gets a functioning kidney, the difference in quality of life is dramatic.
Now a month later, Walker’s kidney is working, the scar is healing and his mobility is getting back to normal.
“I can get up and down the stairs a lot easier than when I first got home,” he said. “But coughing and sneezing still aren’t much fun.”
What it also means is that daddy and daughter have more time together. Before leaving for the hospital on Dec. 2, Walker went to wake up his daughter to tell her where he was going.
“She said, ‘Yes! Now I get to have my Daddy back,’” Walker said.
They never doubted a kidney eventually would come to them, Christine said, but she admitted that the wait at times was excruciating. Walker’s father, Kenneth, received a kidney transplant in June.
“We knew he was getting close because (Transplant Program staffers) were calling around to check up on him,” she said, “to make sure he was keeping himself in good shape and taking his medications.”
Donor kidneys are matched to potential recipients through a stringent matrix of criteria that include blood type, tissue suitability, age, relative health of both organ and patient.
The number of acceptable donor kidneys has declined during the past four years, Biggar said. Donors now tend to be older, because they live longer — even with illness — so many of the organs received are not suitable for younger patients like Walker.
While the living donor population — people who surrender an organ to a relative or other close match and continue to live with a single kidney — has held steady, Maine’s rate of deceased organ donors has mirrored a national trend in decline.
Additionally, donor trends coincide with economic decline: Financially-difficult times mean fewer donors and even fewer acceptable donated organs, Biggar said.
Now that time is spent measuring recovery instead of anticipation, however, other habits gradually are are changing, too. Cullen was limited to 1-1.5 liters, or a little less than a half-gallon, of liquid per day while he was undergoing dialysis. Now he has to remind himself that he can have an extra glass of water when he feels like it, or that a larger bowl of soup is not going to come back to haunt him hours later in the form of muscle cramps.
“It’s getting easier,” he said. “I catch myself saying, ‘Geez, I better not have any more,’ but then I remember that I can have a glass of juice in the middle of the day, or that I can have it without a meal, if I want it.”
In one sense, the Walkers have been paying the process forward through their annual benefit golf tournament, Golfing Fore! Kidneys, held every summer at Bath Golf Course.
An avid golfer, Cullen figured it was a good way to raise awareness and money for the Maine Medical Center Transplant Assistance Fund and have some fun at the same time.
“This will be the fourth year we’ve done it,” he said, referring to the one-day event scheduled for July 26, 2014.
“It’ll be nice to be out there and be one of the success stories, not one of the people still waiting.”
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
