A kidney to spare: Area woman donates life-saving kidney to coworker

Leigh Ann Colson is what you'd call a straight shooter.

When her coworker Debbie Smoot needed a kidney, she gave her one. When people ask her why, she says she didn't really think about it. When one of the doctors asked if she'd like a picture of the kidney, she said yes.

So halfway through the operation, one of the doctors took a picture of the kidney. It's a wet, pink lump in a stainless steel bowl, shining under the operating room headlamps. Surgical instruments sit arrayed beside it. It's enough to churn a weak stomach.

But because of Leigh Ann Colson's selfless act, that kidney saved Debbie Smoot's life.

Debbie got her kidney transplant Jan. 18, 2013. It's a date she rattles off in her easy Charleston, Missouri, drawl as readily as if it were her birthday.

She can also name the date she learned she needed a transplant, but it's different. When she says March 15, 2012, it comes out sober, heavy, as if she's still weary from a nine-hour dialysis treatment.

"These are the dates that my life changed," she says.

The two women had worked together in the Charleston courthouse for six years as probate clerk and circuit clerk, respectively, before Debbie's doctor urged her to see a specialist about her high blood pressure in February 2012.

At first, it didn't seem like anything serious. She had dealt with high blood pressure for years, but she promised to follow up on it.

That March, she saw another doctor who ordered a battery of tests. The next morning, she received a message at the courthouse from the doctor insisting she visit a kidney specialist as soon as possible.

For Debbie, it meant more tests, more waiting, more feeling vaguely ill and not knowing why. After a few days, the nephrologist called her into his office, saying it was urgent.

He had discovered she was suffering from kidney failure caused by a condition called IgA neuropathy; she would need to begin dialysis immediately. She was shocked.

Debbie Smoot, left, and Leigh Ann Colson chat outside the Mississippi County Courthouse in Charleston, Missouri. Colson donated a kidney to Smoot in January 2013. (Laura Simon)

"I had been feeling fatigued, but I thought that was just part of working a full-time job and being a wife and mother," she recalls. "I thought it was just normal, but he told me, 'We need to start now. I don't want you going home; you don't need clothes, you need to go to the hospital.'"

So she crossed the street to the hospital and entered the rabbit-hole of her new medical reality, full of tests, medical jargon and uncertainty.

"I had never heard of IgA neuropathy before. They told me it's not real common, and usually found more in men and Asian women," she says. "I started dialysis on the 15th of March."

Had she known about the condition sooner, she might have been able to manage it with steroids, but the damage was done. Her kidneys were shot. Regular dialysis treatments would keep her blood from turning septic, but it was a temporary fix, not a cure. She needed a transplant.

They put her on the waiting list and told her that in Missouri, she should expect to wait about three years to be matched up with a suitable donor.

In terms of transplant waiting lists, three years is relatively short. In Chicago, for example, patients expect to spend four to six years waiting for a kidney. In California, it's five to eight. But Smoot says after beginning dialysis, three years began to seem like a very long time.

"Dialysis is very hard on your body," she says. "It just saps you. I was just so weak all the time."

She tried to keep as normal a schedule as possible, managing her job and family life, all while doing hours of peritoneal dialysis every night. Leigh Ann remembers how taxing the procedures were on Debbie.

"After you're on dialysis for a while, your quality of life deteriorates," she says. "I saw Debbie come into the office every day with that look on her face like it was all she could do just to get herself up out of bed in the morning."

Dialysis isn't just exhausting; it can be dangerous. Heart failure and infection are so common that the annual mortality rate for dialysis patients is 10 percent, and twice that for those with diabetes.

Fortunately, Debbie wasn't diabetic, but if the doctors were right, three years stood between her and a new kidney. If that was the case, there was a 30 percent chance she wouldn't live long enough to receive a transplant at all.

She didn't like those odds, so she asked the doctors what else she could do. They told her if she found an eligible voluntary donor, she could have the transplant in a matter of months. In addition, a transplant from a living donor was a better prospect medically. A kidney recovered from a deceased donor will function for eight and a half years on average, compared to 20 years if it comes from a live donor. It would greatly behoove her to find a voluntary donor.

Still, she struggled with the idea of putting such a heavy request to her loved ones. So when her friends and family members immediately signed up for screening, she was amazed. Leigh Ann ended up at the top of the list.

"I didn't really think about it," Leigh Ann says. "Debbie came into the office with a phone number to call and see if you'd be a candidate for donation, so

Leigh Ann said, 'Yeah, I'll do that.'"

But she blanched when she received her testing materials.

"I'm not a needle person," she says. "And they sent me this package with 13 vials in it."

Her son urged her to pitch them, only halfway joking.

"He said if I filled up all of them [with blood], I wouldn't have anything left," she recalls.

But she realized that a little blood work was nothing compared to what Debbie went through every night. She filled the vials and sent them off. Then the waiting started.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, Debbie's mother died, but she couldn't visit the nursing home. Her treatments had made her too sick. That night was as long and bitterly disappointing as any she had endured since she was diagnosed, but the next day, she got the phone call she had been waiting for.

They had found a match. Debbie was as excited as she was apprehensive. All of a sudden there was real hope. The surgery was scheduled for Jan. 18, a Friday. The hospital couldn't tell Debbie who the donor was, but Leigh Ann could. She had never had any intention of backing out. Her friend needed a kidney. She had a spare. And in a way, being a kidney donor is good for you.

Since the screening process is so exhaustive, prospective donors sometimes find medical conditions before they become symptomatic. Also, if someone is healthy enough to donate a kidney, his or her chances of developing renal failure are considerably lower.

Leigh Ann did have some qualms about the surgery. However, a transplant coordinator from Missouri Transplant Services explained that statistically, she would be more at risk on the highway driving to the hospital than she would be in the operating room, words that would seem oddly prescient when the blizzard struck.

Debbie and Leigh Ann remember the long ride up to St. Louis University Hospital when January rolled around.

"It was 20 miles per hour the entire way," Debbie says.

It gave her a few more hours to stew in weary optimism and guarded excitement.

"I was nervous. Nervous I'd get rejected, but at the same time thinking what it would be like to not have to be on a machine anymore," she says.

When they arrived at the hospital and told the front desk they were there to do a transplant, the staff whisked Debbie off into one room and Leigh Ann into another. They were warned that hospital protocol mandated donors and recipients remain separated. It might have been amusing, had it not been such a heavy time. A year later, Leigh Ann laughs about it.

"They said, 'Oh! You two aren't supposed to be together!' and we just said, 'OK, well we rode up here together,'" she says. "Unless they told me I couldn't [donate], I wasn't going to change my mind."

The nurses gave her a chance to back out, offering to tell Debbie that something had come up wrong in a test. They were wasting their time.

"She's my probate clerk and I want to make sure she's at work every day," Leigh Ann said.

Dr. Peter Horton performed the transplant and can recite the procedure by rote in his neat, British accent with the type of fastidiousness that's genuinely reassuring to see in a transplant surgeon.

They cut out Leigh Ann's left kidney, and after a quick snapshot to satiate her curiosity, put it inside Debbie. Apparently, the kidney didn't even notice. It just began cleaning Debbie's blood.

Now Debbie is back working at the Charleston courthouse. She says she feels good again, feels blessed, and is obviously grateful to Leigh Ann.

"Every day I sit here and look across the office and thank God because she gave me back my life," she says.

Leigh Ann says she thinks more people should try to be living donors.

"If you've got two healthy kidneys, you can make all the difference in someone else's life," she says. "Honestly, if I had another one to give, I'd do it."

It's safe to say she's telling the truth.