A daughter's gift to her mother
Vickie Clark, front, recently received the gift of life from her daughter, Melisa Palmour, who donated a kidney to her mother. Both are doing well and the prognosis is positive for the future.
Six months ago, Vickie Clark of Temple received that gift from her daughter, Melisa Palmour, in the form of a kidney donation.
Clark has suffered from diabetes for several years, but on Oct. 31, 2008, she received some startling news. Her doctor told her that her kidneys were failing and she needed to be under the care of a kidney specialist. It wasn’t long before she was told she would need a kidney transplant.
“It all happened so quickly,” she said. “It was Dec. 16, 2008, the first time I heard that word, transplant, and that I needed to get ready for dialysis.”
Clark planned to keep the news to herself until after Christmas, but her daughter suspected something wasn’t right with her mother and confronted her. When she received the news, Palmour didn’t hesitate to begin the proceedings to see if she was a donor match for her mother.
“There was no question,” she said.
Clark said she was concerned for her daughter and her future life with only one kidney. However, doctors put her mind at ease by telling her that a person can live a normal life with only one kidney. Palmour has been told by doctors that her remaining kidney will enlarge to make up for the one that’s missing.
“Grateful doesn’t even describe how I feel about what she did for me,” Clark said.
Clark was diagnosed with diabetes in 1985, but had never shown any symptoms that there was anything wrong with her kidneys until 2008. Her son, Robert, is the only other member of the family who also has been diagnosed with diabetes so he couldn’t be considered as a potential donor.
A few years ago, Palmour decided to make some changes in her life regarding her health by altering her diet and getting regular exercise, all of which she said came easy. Now she believes that decision and the ease with which the changes came served a higher purpose.
“I felt like there was a reason that it came so easy, but when she dropped the bomb I just knew that was what I was here for,” Palmour said. “That’s why I never questioned the evaluation. I always knew it was all going to work out. If they would have told me I wasn’t a match, I would have been devastated.”
Leading up to the transplant, Palmour was repeatedly asked if she had made the decision to donate her kidney to her mother of her own free will and was given the chance to back out up until she was put to sleep for the procedure.
“I told them it was hers all along, I’ve just been borrowing it for the last few years,” she said.
Clark was fortunate to have a close relative that was a matching donor. According to OrganDonor.gov, the federal government’s Web site on organ and tissue donation and transplantation, as of February there were nearly 106,000 people on the transplant list awaiting an organ and the average weight for a kidney is 1,121 days — more than three years.
Clark waited less than a year from the time she was told she would need a new kidney to the time of her transplant.
“She was my only hope for a living donor,” Clark said. “With a living donor who is related to you, I have a much better chance of keeping the kidney. The best scenario is if you get it from a sibling, but the next best thing is to get a transplant from one of your children.”
The procedure took place so fast that Clark never had to go on dialysis, which she definitely would have had to do if her daughter wasn’t a match because her kidney function was down to 10 percent at the time of the transplant.
While it took 12 days for Clark to recover enough to leave the hospital, Palmour was released four days later and was back at work within two weeks.
Clark must return for follow-up visits twice a month and doctors tell her she’s progressing well.
“They tell me everything is fine,” she said. “I will say that the first four months were bad, but I didn’t realize how bad they were until I started feeling good. What it turned out to be was the anti-rejection medicine wasn’t agreeing with me. My body just didn’t like it and it was aggravating the kidneys, so they put me on another medicine and within two days I was like a different person.”
Palmour was told this week at her six-month follow-up appointment that she is doing so well she doesn’t need to come back for a year.
“People need to know how easy it is for donors,” said Palmour, who had never had surgery before the transplant. “I think more people would do it if they only knew how little of an inconvenience it is.”
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