An 'organic' Waterloo friendship
Retired Waterloo city engineer receives kidney from friend who answers wife's appeal
WATERLOO – Eric Thorson and Peggy Dandy have a few things in common: Good friends, civic involvement -- and a kidney.
Eric and his wife, Judy, met Peggy at a Christmas party at the home of their friends Don and Michelle Temeyer years ago.
Neither were strangers to Waterloo city government. Eric Thorson was city engineer. Dandy, who worked at John Deere, served on the city Human Rights Commission and on the Waerloo Public Library board of trustees.
The friendship between the Thorsons and Dandy reached a level they scarcely could have imagined when they first met at the Temeyers way back when.
In 2020, a kidney Eric had received in a transplant decades earlier began failing. He needed another. Judy posted an appeal on social media. While many stepped up, Dandy ended up being a perfect match.
Now, about a year and a half later, both are doing fine.
In her social media appeal for a kidney for her husband, Judy Thorson noted potential donors needed to have an O-positive blood type.
“I thought, ‘Oh gosh, I’m O-positive!” Dandy said.
“And that’s a little on the rare side,” Thorson said. “If you’re O-positive you can pretty much only get an O-positive kidney.”
“I lived in Florida at the time; I was working for Deere from home,” Dandy said. “So I responded back to Judy and said ‘You know, I’m O-positive, why don’t I look into this?’ “
She underwent numerous tests. It’s a thorough process.
“Even if there’s the slightest health issue, they rule people out,” Eric Thorson said. “I had probably maybe between 10 and 15 folks who wanted to donate for me, but most of them were ruled out for various health reasons. Some got a lot further along in the process than others. I was very lucky there were a number of people who wanted to do it, but Peggy ended up being the one that got the farthest.”
In the intervening months. Peggy moved back to Iowa. While the initial testing was through The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., which also had a facility in Florida, the Thorsons and Dandy settled on the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City.
Thorson retired in 2018 after working for the city of Waterloo almost 50 years. His kidney issues began in the 1970s.
“It must have started about 1976 or ’77. I had to go on dialysis,” he said. “I had just started working for the city, and was trying to get my professional engineering license,” requiring four years’ service under a professional engineer and additional testing.
“I decided I wanted to get that out of the way before I pursued anything else,” he said. “I was getting along with dialysis okay. Once I got my license then I started thinking about doing a transplant,” which he he received in June 1981 at UIHC.
At that time, all donors were deceased persons. “It’s changed a lot,” Thorson said.
The first living-donor live transplant was in 1989, according to the Organ Procurement and Transportation Network of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Since then, live-donor transplants, while not the norm, certainly have become more widespread.
According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, there were 6,466 live-donor transplants in 2022, about 15 percent of the total, a record 42,887 organ transplants. Live-donor transplants decreased slightly from 2021. Live-donor transplants peaked at 7,389 in 2019, decreasing to 5,726 in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, then bounced back to 6,541 in 2021. About 60 percent of all organ transplants are kidneys.
Contacts between a recipient and a donor or donor’s family, if the parties agree, can be arranged through the hospital. In Thorson’s case, of course, he and Judy knew his donor in advance.
There’s no guarantee how long a donated kidney lasts, Thorson said. “They can go anywhere from months, to a few years, to, like me, almost 40 years,” he said. “It just depends on how well It matches and how well you take care of yourself.”
When the kidney starts to fail, “It really changes your diet, and it changes your activity, and you go on dialysis,” Thorson said. “And it’s three times a week for three or four hours, based on your body weight and other things.
”And I was always good about following the diet closely, and not gaining too much weight between sessions. So I could get along pretty easily,” he said. “But it really ties you down.” Travel is somewhat easier now because of the proliferation of dialysis centers.
”I would say it’s always in the back of your mind” that a transplanted kidney may fail, he said. “The longer you go, the less you think about it. You can get back to a pretty normal life with a transplant. which is amazing.
”It wasn’t a total suprise,” he said of the kidney failure. “It is kind of a downer. But you do what you have to do,” with good medical facilities and staff available locally.
But when the need for a kidney arises, “It’s hard to ask people,” he said. “That’s not easy. It’s more acceptable now than it was 40 years ago. I really have to thank Judy. She’s the one who did the Facebook posts and went after it. It’s really her doing, more than mine, that she put it out there and made the plea.
”And a lot of people tried, and I lucked out with Peggy. Tremendously,” Thorson said.
Regarding her decision to be a donor, Dandy said, “Honestly, I prayed about it. If I made it through all the steps, it was meant to be. And my recovery time; I was out the next day!”
”She’s amazing,” Thorson said.
”No issues at all, “ Dandy said. “It’s amazing.”
Normally, Thorson said, it might be two or three days. But Dandy had “really great health, which is a plus factor.”
"I figure I got a free checkup” by applying, Dandy said.
“They are very thorough,” Thorson said.
Dandy said she even met with a psychologist to check emotional health and frame of mind entering into such a procedure.
”They don’t leave a stone unturned,” Thorson said. “A number of people who tried (to be donors) discovered health issues they didn’t know they had. It is beneficial to the possible donors. If you have something else going on, you certainly find out about it.”
“I have to be extremely grateful for those folks who made that offer,” Thorson said. “There may have been others that I don’t even know about” who offered to be a donor but chose to remain anonymous, in addition to the 10 to 15 who chose to tell him directly. It’s important, and he’s grateful, because he does not have a large living extended family.
The day of the procedure, “we met in a room, and a priest came in, and we had a little prayer, and Peggy went first.,” Thorson said.
“I never had surgeries, or been in a hospital, so that was a concern,” Dandy said.
“So we met in Peggy’s room” for prayer, Thorson said.
Both procedures were done in a few hours. Thorson said he spent four or five days in recovery in the hospital.
And Judy Thorson is no stranger to the procedure either. “She’s had four,” Eric said. “That’s how we met. The dialysis nurse introduced us years ago,” at the former Schoitz Hospital in Waterloo. “I’d had my first kidney transplant and she was waiting for one, and they introduced us.”
The Thorsons celebrated their 36th wedding anniversary in July — thanks to their friend Peggy’s early anniversary present - a gift of life.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state.
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