There are different types of neighbours.
There are neighbours who smile and wave at each other, maybe get together for the occasional barbecue or shovel each other’s driveway.
There are neighbours who never speak and secretly wish the other people would just move away.
And then there’s Tracey Louvros and Dave Kozoris, neighbours in Brocklehurst for the past eight years.
Dave needs a kidney.
Tracey is jumping through all the medical hoops she needs to so she can give Dave one of hers.
Why?
“Because he needs one,” Tracey says matter-of-factly.
Right now, Dave’s living without his kidneys, which were removed in February as a result of the polycystic kidney disease he had — essentially, his kidneys were filling up with grape-shaped growths, distending his stomach and shoving all his other organs into places they weren’t meant to be.
After the surgeons removed the two organs, they were weighed. One hit 20 pounds, the other was seven pounds. Kidneys usually weigh not much more than four ounces. “I couldn’t breathe,” Dave says. “It was hard to walk.” He’s been on dialysis ever since.
When he got home from the hospital, Dave and his wife, Betty, talked with Tracey and her husband, Nick. Dave told them what the doctors had said — the next step was to find a kidney for transplant. “I said, ‘I’ll give you one of mine,’” Tracey says. “And he laughed at me.
“But I thought it was day surgery. In April, when we started the paperwork, I started reading it all and I was talking to them [medical staff] and I said, ‘I’ve got to call you back’.
“And I went over to Dave’s and said ‘Dave, this isn’t day surgery’.”
In fact, if Tracey’s kidney turns out to be one with which Dave can live — phase three of the tests will be completed today (Aug. 25) — Tracey is looking at several days in St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, and then up to six weeks recovering at home.
So far, having gone through a battery of tests, all she knows for sure is that she is in good health. The process started with reams and reams of paperwork. The next step was to review Tracey’s medical history and discuss the steps she needed to take before she would even be considered, which included ensuring her body-mass index was at a specific level.
It is.
The third phase addresses compatibility and, although they have different blood types, Dave says there are so many ways doctors can address this to ensure her kidney would work in his body. At one point, when the two families were talking about this unique neighbourly exchange, Tracey’s son, James, said he’d donate his kidney if his mom couldn’t.
“He can’t. He’s too young,” Tracey says of her 19-year-old son. “But that’s just how we all feel about Dave.”
Tracey’s been on the organ-donor list since 2006, when Kamloops residents were urged sign up as Nina Johnson waited for a heart transplant. The Kamloops teen died in July of that year, but Tracey’s commitment to step up if her name was called didn’t waver. Should she not be compatible, the surgery could still proceed.
Dave says in cases like that, doctors opt for a process called pairing, which sees two incompatible kidneys exchanged — helping out a pair of patients.
Dave says his doctors have told them they’ve done up to six pairings at one time.
While Tracey’s been going through a battery of tests, so has Dave, most of them focused on ensuring his mental health is strong enough to cope with the transplant. Now retired, Dave once worked at the Weyerhaeuser mill as an assistant manager, responsible for hiring, firing and other work. “So I cope with stress well,” he says. “And I’ve been a little lucky with my genes. I act and feel a little younger than I am.”
That luck stepped up when his kidneys were removed. After the surgery, Dave says, he didn’t recover as well or as quickly as doctors expected, resulting in a quick air-ambulance trip to Vancouver for more tests, which revealed he had a heart attack during the kidney-removal surgery.
“Part of my heart was just flopping around in there,” he says. But doctors quickly treated it — to the point Dave and his wife were able to spend about 10 weeks in their motorhome driving to Newfoundland and back, with the dialysis machine on board.
“He doesn’t like to be kept down,” Tracey says of her neighbour.
While Dave’s been lucky, having a potential donor next door, others wait for months — and sometimes forever — for a transplant. “Oh, God, there’s lots of waiting,” Dave says. “They say for every 93 people who sign up [on the donor list], by the time they’ve all filtered out, there are only two or three left.” Potential donors change their minds. Their health changes. There are many reasons why so many drop out, Dave says.
Tracey says people have questioned her decision.
“Some of them have said I’m jeopardizing my own family. “Well, how?
“This is the right thing to do.”
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