Kay Burt was facing death and only her family could help her - We all like to think of ourselves as generous, ready to give what we can when we can. This is the story of one family where giving has become a way of life. Because in this family, it was the only way to save the life of one member --- other family members giving of themselves, literally, again and again, and again. In the process, they made medical history. Correspondent Hoda Kotbe reports.
"I have a little phrase that I'm like a Timex watch" says 48-year-old Kay Burt. "I take my lickings and keep on ticking, so I don't know what it is but I keep on going." Burt has kept on ticking far longer and much better than anyone ever predicted. "I have a desire and determination to live," she says. Desire and determination are only part of the picture. This Texas native wouldn't be here at all if it wasn't for her remarkable family, because time and time again, they stepped forward and literally gave of themselves to her, in ways that none of them could have ever imagined. It started right in the delivery room; at birth, Kay urgently needed a lifesaving blood transfusion. "So they put my father on one table and my mother and me on the other, ans put blood directly into me from him," says Kay.
Kay says her father, Charles Kilgore was a man for whom selfless acts were simply second nature. She remembers him as a larger-than-life figure. "My hero," she says. "He's happy, jolly, laughing all the time. He made you feel good when you were around him." But by the time Kay was 11 she'd stopped feeling good --- the energetic young girl began to feel exhausted, at times struggling just to breathe. Her condition became so severe, her parents rushed her to the hospital. That ambulance ride would mark the beginning of a three-year hospital stay and the knowledge that death was never very far away.
"I had asked my folks to tell me if I was dying," says Kay. "I wanted to know. And they told me yes."
The problem turned out to be Kay's kidneys --- the pair of bean-shaped organs that filter waste from the blood and produce urine. Kay had been born with unusually small kidneys --- large enough to sustain her as a young shild, but far too tiny to keep a growing teenager alive for very long.
"You looked at her and you knew she was, you know, she was doomed to die," says Dr. Wadi Suki, chief of the Kidney Disease Division at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "And that sort of grabs you."
In the early 1960s, Dr. Suki was one of Kay's doctors at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Back then, what could he do for Kay?"Back then, essentially, nothing," says Dr. Suki. "I knew that short of anything heroic, she wouldn't make it." But heroic measures were thin on the ground. To keep Kay alive, Dr. Suki had only a primitive dialysis machine. Yet even as her condition slowly worsened --- at one point she'd wasted away to just 57 pounds --- the fight didn't quite go out of Kay. "She had that will to live," says Dr. Suki. "She wanted to go back to school. SHe wanted to be a cheerleader, she wanted to live a normal life."
But life on Parkland's Ward 6-East was hardly normal. Kay was far from her family and friends, and even her favorite foods were off-limits. They could damage her already fragile kidneys.
But Kay was a stuborn and hungry young teenager. "I'd sneak down to the snack bar there at Parkland," she says. "And I'd buy me a hamburger with french fries and og up to my room. Hide them from the nurse, put them beneath my housecoat, and go into the bathroom. And I'd just gobble it. I was so hungry." Her case made headlines. And Kay's hospital room filled up with get-well cards. But all the wishes in the world couldn't change the fact that she was slowly dying. Then, a single ray of hope emerged --- a new, but risky, surgical procedure called a kidney transplant was making news.
The doctor said to her "Kay, we think you ought to have a transplant."
Kay's first reaction? "Scared," she says. "And no." But frightening as it was, the procedure was Kay's only option, as one of her doctors made perfectly clear. "He said, 'Kay do you see that corner over there?'" recalls Kay. "And I said, 'yes sir.' He said 'Crawl over there and die because that's exactly what you're going to do if you do not have a kidney transplant.'"
In 1966 it was still the dawn of the transplant era. in the early days, the kidney donor and the recipient had to be biologically related. So once again, her father stepped forward, this time offering one of his own. But this was no simple blood transfusion, like the one he'd given her years earlier. This was a life-threatening procedure for both Kay and her father. "He was determined to do it if he could," says Dr. Suki. "But there were many risks involved: the father was the sole breadwinner in the family, there were young kids, a wife. So you're risking the life of the father." But Charles Kilgore had made up his mind. He'd saved his daughters life before, and now he was determined to do it again.
"I was scared," Kay says. "Especially when they rode me into the operating room and I saw all these lights and these doctors and nurses with these masks on their face, you know. All the lights are like that and going by, and --- jimminy Christams." How many transplants had Dr. Suki been involved with before Kay's? "One," he says. Kay's was only the fifth transplant in Texas, the first between father and daughther. After 12 grueling hours of delicate surgery, doctors finally breathed a sigh of relief. "When she came out and Dr. Peters said that she was making urine," says Dr. Suki. "Those were very sweet words. Youn ever thought that passing urine sounded so sweet, but it was." Kay says, "When I saw my father, and he saw me, we just broke down and cried. And he told me, he said, 'Sugar you got to quit being sick --- Daddy's running out of parts.'"
While the surgery had been a success, Kay wasn't out of the woods just yet: there were still risks of rejection or infection --- and her doctors warned Kay, there was one thing she should never do: get pregnant. So what does Kay do? "I got pregnant," says Kay. For this headstrong teenager, surviving two medical crises wasn't enough. At 18, shorlty after getting married, she found herslef once again in harm's way. "In those days, we felt that with pregnancy, the head of the baby might crush the kidney or pull the connection to the bladder apart or something of that nature," says Dr. Suki. "It was a scary thought." She knew that if she was to have this baby it could put her life at risk. "I could die," says Kay. "But I was bound and determined to have a baby. And i had her." In 1971, Kay gave birth to Cherry --- the child that she was told not to have, the miracle baby for whom she risked her life. "I thought, I just can't believe throught his gift of life that my father has given me," she says, "I've given the gift of life."
New plan to boost organ donation - The three generations shared a very special bond, one which few other families ever have. And as the years rolled by, Kay knew she was luckier than most. "I'm doing my cheerleading." says Kay. "I'm doing my modeling. I'm not 6-foot under like I was told I would be. I beat all those odds." But her personal struggles were not over yet. In 1998, just two years after celebrating the 30th anniversary of the transplant, Kay's father was diagnosed with cancer. The man who had saved her life 30 years earlier was now struggling for his own. "It was so painful," says Kay. "You know I knelt down beside my father one night and I said "Daddy I can't live without you. I just can't" I said 'Please don't go away.' But the Lord had other plans for Daddy and he took him to Heaven." The man who had given so much to his family was gone, leaving Kay almost paralyzed with grief. "I'd lost my best friend," says Kay. "Lost my very, very best friend in the world."
But there was more bad news still to come. Unbelievably, just two weeks after the death of her father, the kidney he'd given to Kay 32 years earlier suddenly began to fail. "Just stopped working," she says. "Just like that, that fast." How does she explain that? "I've thought about it and thought about it and thought about it," says Kay. "And I don't know, but it was eerie." It was more than eerie. It was life-threatening. Her only hope was to get another kidney --- another transplant. But Kay was so devastated by her fathers death. She couldn't face the ordeal for a second time. "I told my family I didn't want to go through that again, no way," says Kay. "I did not want to live." Her father's kidney was by now 72 years old. To survive, Kay would need another transplant to replace it. But she just couldn't face the idea of any more medical ordeals. It looked like the woman who'd beaten the odds so many times before was ready to just --- give up. That's when she had an emotional conversation with her granddaughter, Brittany. "I told her that I wanted her to stay around longer and aslo so she could be at my graduation and I told her I loved her," says Brittany. Kay says, "Well, my heart broke. ANd that's when I went on the dialysis machine." Dialysis is an artificial kidney machine. The hterapy would keep Kay's condition stable, but it wasn't a cure.
"Dialysis is not a normal lifestyle," says Dr. Goran Klintmalm, the chief of transplant surgery at Baylor University Medical Venter in Dallas. He knew what Kay really needed was a new kidney. There were only two ways she could get one; either wait for a donor to die, which in Dallas could take over a year, or find a volunteer willing to offer one of their own kidneys. "The first thing my daughter said to me was, 'where do I go and what do I have to do to save my Mother's life?'" says Kay. What did ti mean to have her own daughter syaing those words to her? "Well, it meant the world," she says. Kay's 28-year-old daughter offered to become a "living donor" --- to undergo the risks of major surgery in order to donate one of her kidneys. "I think that is the neatest, greatest way to help somebody else," says Cherry. If the procedure worked, it would be the first time anyone had ever recieved kidneys from two different generations of the same family. Living donors like Cherry or her grandfather, provide the organs for half of all the kidney transplants performed in the U.S. today. But even so, some transplant surgeons will not use them. They feel that putting a healthy person at risk, even a small risk, is simply unethical.
So Cherry's remarkable offer is put to the test. Doctors at Baylor University Medical Center have to make sure she understands the risks. "They put Cherry through so many different tests and things, because they wanted to make sure that she was giving the kidney of her own free will and not thinking she had to do this," says Kay. But Cherry said her mind was made up. "You know, this is my mom. I have to do this," she says. "I love my mom. You know, I want to do this for her." Still Cherry has her own daughter, plus six step-children from her second marriage to consider. What if something goes wrong in the hospital? "I discussed this with the children and my husband, and they all told me, if you feel like you need to do this, then we're behind you," says Cherry. That's only half the equation. There was still another edcision to be made by Kay. And it's an agonizing call. She needs the kidney, but taking it means letting her miracle baby put herslef in harms way. From a mother's perspective she said, OK, I'm going to take my daughter's kidney. She's young. She has her whole life ahead of her, and clearly this operation was going to put her at risk. "I tried to talk her out of it," says Kay. "But there was no talking her out of it." She's stubborn? "She's stubborn just like I am," says Kay.
On the morning of the historic surgery, Cherry's nerves almost get the best of her. "It's one thing to know it's in a couple of days," she says. "It's another to know it's today." Kay asks her daughter, "Are you going to cry?" Cherry says, "No I'm not going to cry." All too soon, mother and daughter are wheeled on their way, into separate operating rooms. The procedure begins with Cherry. After opening her side, the surgical team removes her left kidney ... and then very carefully walks it down the hall ... and on its journey into another body. "To tkae that cold, lifeless organ and hook it up to the blood vessels and see the transformation," says Dr. Klintmalm. "It's actually one of the miracles in medicine, frankly." What had once been Cherry's, miraculously becomes a part of Kay. The remarkable procedure is a success for mother and daughter. "I felt so much better," says Kay. "It just started working right off the bat and did its job." Cherry says, "I thought, oh I'm so glad my mom's OK and it seems to be doing good for her." While most kidney transplants are routine these days, even Dr. Suki, Kay's Physician from her first transplant, says this case is far from routine.
How would Dr. Suki categorize this whole case? "pioneering surgery, pioneering pregnancy," he says. "To recieve a kidney from a daughther she wasn't supposed to have had, that's very unique." So for Kay Burt, alive beacuse of a father's love and a daughter's sacrifice, the cycle of life continues. "I've been blessed." It's now been a year since Kay's last transplant, and she has passed an important milestone. The risk of organ rejection decreases sharply after six months. Since her operation, Kay has shown no sign of organ rejection.
This report was prepared by Correspondent Hoda Kotbe; Producer Jeff Cooperman.
