Transplant (the first one)

It was determined around Thanksgiving time that LaWrell Cook was a match for donating to Bryce. They had tested all his siblings: Moff, Marcus, Linc, Duke and Brad were all ineligible to donate because they had antibodies incompatible with Bryce. Antibodies in their blood would cause Bryce's body to reject the kidney. His younger siblings Katie and Kyle were both suitable matches but were unable to donate because they were under 18. They also alluded to not wanting to let Katie donate because she hadn't had children and pregnancy is hard on your kidneys, so you need as much function there as you can get.

After his siblings were ruled out they opened it up to other potential donors to be tested. Several people in the community contacted the Transplant Coordinator and went through the process. 

Now a little back story on LaWrell Cook. He and his wife JoDee moved to Clifton while Bryce was on his mission and became fast friends with the Mumfords. They have 4 children, the oldest of which is a few years younger than Bryce's youngest brother Kyle and they live just down the road from the Mumfords. JoDee's Dad, Joe, had kidney problems for years and at this time (2004) he'd had 2 kidney transplants already. Just after Bryce had this transplant Joe had a 3rd so their family was very familiar with the whole process. They knew the best doctors, all the terminology, warning signs, medicines and all this kidney stuff entailed. They were a huge support to Bryce and his family through all this.

The steps for being tested to be a donor are unique. They don't want the family to put any pressure on people to be tested. Or any pressure to donate once they are deemed a match. If you want to donate, you contact the transplant team, they send you the info and you go through the steps. If you are a match, they contact you and let you know. You decide if you want to move ahead, and if so, tell the potential recipient yourself. Bryce's family didn't know LaWrell was being tested, so this was such an unexpected, wonderful surprise.

They scheduled the transplant for the morning of December 16th.

December 16th morning came and the Cooks and Mumford crews arrived at the LDS Hospital in SLC. They prepped LaWrell and had his IV in, and were getting ready to poke Bryce when his nurse got a call. She said they had to cancel the surgery and move it to another day. 

I can't imagine the stress, the emotional toll that would take. The months of worry, sleepless nights, prayers, fasting, disappointment when people weren't a match... Just wanting this whole ordeal to be over, not to mention right before Christmas and wanting to move on from it. And it got cancelled at the last minute for no apparent reason!

(A few weeks afterwards, they put the pieces together and figured out there had been a large avalanche with a few casualties and the transplant team had to harvest the organs and perform the surgeries for those time critical transplants first. That's why they had to move the surgery. Of course the hospital can't confirm this, but this was their best guess.)

But in true Mumford and Cook form, they pushed onward with a smile on their faces. They drove back to the bowling alley in Preston and ate pizza while they bowled their frustrations away.

December 21st was the new surgery date.

Luckily nothing prevented it from moving ahead this time.

The surgery went well and lasted about 6 hours. It was a much more invasive surgery for LaWrell than it was for Bryce. His body has to learn how to go from two functioning kidneys to one, not to mention just getting to the kidney is more difficult. He says he has had no problems or complications, his body has adjusted just fine.

Naturally, this has bonded our family to the Cooks in a way we can't fully explain. They are family.

It's hard to put into words how thankful we are to LaWrell and his family for their gift and sacrifice. Providing a life saving gift has been life changing. This all happened before I even met Bryce. I can't imagine how different my life would be without him, had he not had the transplant when he did. How can you possibly thank someone for a gift like that? It has blessed our lives in more ways than we could ever know.

The Beginning of the Beginning

I guess the story really begins the summer of 1999. Bryce already had his mission call and was getting ready to leave. He had been having some pain in his joints that would come and go. They went to their family doctor in Preston who diagnosed it as tendonitis. He prescribed a pill, Bryce went home and took it, rested on the couch and in a couple hours the pain was gone. He went on his mission and had it return for a day or two from time to time, but it never got too bad or stayed around too long.

He got back from his mission the summer of 2001 and it flared up big time. He had it in his elbows, knees, feet, ankles. Several times it got so bad he couldn't get out of bed or do anything. All through this time he would take NSAID's (Non Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs or Advil/Ibuprofen) for the pain. One evening in August it was bugging him as he helped to install the Cooks sprinkler system and they sent home home early to rest. A couple days later they were back at the Cooks and playing basketball outside. Bryce's Dad handed him a mini-basketball and asked him to shoot a basket from the free throw line. Bryce told him he wasn't sure he could, his Dad told him to just try. It only made it about halfway to the basket. (Side note: Anyone who knows Bryce knows he was really hurting if he couldn't make it to the basket! He is super competitive in sports and games. So much so that he doesn't believe in letting little kids win whenever he plays a game or race with them.) His Dad said "This isn't right. A kid your age should not be having this kind of pain or health problems. We need to get this looked at right away." Wanting to know what was going on and how to get it to stop, Bryce agreed.

They went to see a Doctor of Internal Medicine at the hospital in Logan a few days later. He said he wasn't sure what it was, ordered bloodwork and sent them to another internist. The second internist said it could be rheumatoid arthritis (RA) or something kidney related. He suggested they rule out RA first and if they determined it wasn't that, then they would look into it being the kidney. As they were leaving they stopped by the front desk (probably to get some info or make a follow up appointment) and Bryce said the doctor came running out to them. He showed them the numbers from his bloodwork and said "See this number here? That's your uric acid amount, and it is very high. I don't know how I missed it before, but that points to it being kidney related. I'm going to refer you to Dr. Senekjian, who is a nephrologist." (Nephrologist is a kidney doctor/specialist)

Bryce had his appointment with Dr. Senekjian, they looked at his bloodwork numbers and talked about his symptoms. He said he thought the joint pain was gout, which is when your kidney stops filtering out the uric acid and it builds up in your joints and crystallizes (like bone spurs). He wanted Bryce to have a kidney biopsy to see it's function. The biopsy was a painful, horrible experience (I am so glad I didn't have to be there! They basically stick you with a big needle that is like an apple corer and take out a chunk of your kidney for analysis) and required a stay in the hospital for a few days until he recovered. Of course his joint pain during this time was horrible, so they drew some fluid off his ankle to determine if it was in fact gout. The biopsy showed a large amount of scar tissue on the kidney with limited kidney function, with an official name for his kidney failure being chronic interstitial nephritis; the other test showed the pain in his joints was gout. They are still unsure what caused his kidneys to fail. Dr. Senekjian told him to stop taking NSAID's for the pain no matter how bad it got, and to do regular blood tests so they could see how things kept going with his kidney.

By July of 2004, his tests showed his kidney function was low enough Dr. Senekjian said he thought it was time to put Bryce's name on the transplant list and get things moving in that direction. By this point Bryce was back in school at BYU-Idaho. He would get gout a lot and missed class frequently because of it. He said he remembers one week in particular it was so bad and he went home and his Mom took care of him and did everything for him. 

Around Thanksgiving time Bryce came home and saw his Mom and JoDee Cook visiting at the table. His Mom told him LaWrell Cook was a match and wanted to donate.

I've included some helpful links to terms that might be new to some of you. Sometimes I forget because they are so commonplace to us. And some of them are too involved to explain them as I bring them up. They are the blue underlined words in the post. Click on them for more info.

Introduction

I have been toying with starting this blog in my brain about a thousand (no, really!) times in the past year. There is a lot of back story and information about this whole kidney deal that people are always asking about and wanting to know. We don't mind answering questions at all. But I feel like maybe people get tired of hearing us talk about or reference it on social media. I finally decided to just have it all in one place. And maybe this can serve as my journal when this is all over.

Writing my thoughts and feelings down is cathartic for me. Something about getting them out of my head so they're not swirling around has a way of making them fall together and make sense to me. I have realizations I can't seem to come by any other way. So maybe this blog won't be read by many or gain a ton of followers. But it is helpful for me, and gives me an outlet for all that's going on in my brain and heart.