CLARE - No one will guess when Sandy McCabe takes her dogs to the All Breeds Dog Show in Des Moines this weekend that she's lucky to be up and moving at all.
Nor would they even consider that Wade Koistinen, the handler of her dog Rumor, will be running around the ring with just one kidney.
At the dog show, it's all about dogs, with little thought given to the story behind the dogs.
Sandy McCabe's story started years ago, when she developed type 1 juvenile diabetes. She fought medical problems most of her life, but pending renal failure last summer meant just one thing: dialysis or kidney transplant. At 49 years old, she would be put on a national transplant list. Patients on that list are on dialysis an average four to six years.
Neither of McCabe's daughters could donate a kidney - the oldest, Kelly, has just one and a half kidneys, and the youngest, Kimberly, had a liver transplant when she was just 2. Kevin, her husband, is on too many medications to be a donor. Her parents were too old.
Asking anyone for a kidney didn't sit well with McCabe.
"You don't ask anybody for a kidney," she said. "It's too important, too hard. Getting a kidney from a cadaver is a different matter completely. He's not using it."
So McCabe braced herself and waited. She would have gone on waiting, but her friend and dog handler, Wade Koistinen, stepped forward. He knew she needed a kidney, so he called the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., from his home in Kansas City, Mo., to say he wanted to be tested.
They told him to have blood drawn and send them the results; he drove to Rochester instead. They told him they'd schedule necessary tests for him at home; he had the tests taken in Rochester. He was a perfect match. They told him their team would consider the transplant and get back to him in two or three weeks.
He told them, "Listen, she's ready to go on dialysis. She needs a kidney. I have a kidney for her. So, if you want my kidney, you need to do the transplant within a week."
They did.
"He had watched me get sicker and sicker, and I could do less and less," McCabe said. "I didn't know I looked so bad until right before surgery. My eyes were sunk into my head. I call it the death look. I got used to what I looked like. When I felt that bad, who cares?"
Throughout her life, McCabe has had a number of surgeries, many because of her diabetes. That includes five laser surgeries on each eye, two shoulder surgeries, knee surgery, an ovary removed, a hysterectomy, two cesarean sections, carpal tunnel surgery on both wrists and toe surgery on both feet. She's had a broken hip and a broken ankle.
Six years ago she had a quadruple bypass, and because of her diabetes, doctors had trouble finding veins to use for the bypass. Both legs were filleted open, she said, from ankle to groin.
"But you have no choice, you do it," she said.
In the next three years, her diabetes got worse. She studied up on pancreatic transplants and called Mayo Clinic. Rejection medicine would destroy her kidneys, but diabetes already was destroying them, so she had the pancreas transplant, which she calls truly wonderful.
"I traded one illness for another," she said. "I'm no longer diabetic, but I'm a transplant patient. Anti-rejection medicine lowers your white blood cell count, your immunity. I'm on Prednisone for life."
Three years later, with the kidneys close to shutting down, McCabe said she kept telling her doctor, "I don't really feel that bad," but the doctor told her, "You don't know how bad you feel."
She does now. She knows how bad she felt because she feels so much better. She was hospitalized just 4 1/2 days after the transplant; Koistinen just 2 1/2 days.
She'll take anti-rejection medicine forever, but that's a small price to pay. Her forearms are paper thin - a result of the Prednisone - so she bruises or gets open wounds just by bumping into something. Doggie toenails are wicked - she almost always wears long sleeves while working with her dogs, but it's the dogs that keep her going.
"I never slow down," she said. "I just keep going."
Contact Sandy Mickelson at (515)573-2141 or smickelson@messengernews.net
