Donating life: Local men get new kidneys, new chance at life

[Karol]

Donating life: Local men get new kidneys, new chance at life
SUNDAY, 14 APRIL 2013 02:10    JOHN LINDBLOM   

Clockwise, from top, California Highway Patrol Officer Steve Curtis, Dr. Mark Cooper, Nicole Newton and businessman Bob Rider get together in Clearlake, Calif., to mark their unique relationships: Newton donated a kidney to Cooper and Curtis donated a kidney to Rider. Photo by John Lindblom.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Nicole Newton, a records and communications supervisor for the Clearlake Police Department, and Steve Curtis, a California Highway Patrol officer, never met until last week. But they have one important thing in common: Both had enough heart to donate a kidney.

The beneficiaries of their ultimate acts of humanity were Mark Cooper, a well-known dentist in Clearlake, and Robert Rider, a former police officer who owns a sporting goods store in the same town and lives in Hidden Valley Lake.

They, too, had never met until last week, although, ironically, Cooper is dentist to Rider’s wife, Brianna, and two of the couple’s four sons.

What these two men have in common is undying gratitude to their donors, and the good fortune of having someone close to their family with a “perfect match” and the willingness to go through the surgical process of giving up a kidney.

In Cooper’s case, Newton was a friend of his daughter’s. Curtis and Rider became acquainted while attending Hidden Valley Lake Community Church.

There currently are about 117,000 people across the United States waiting for organ transplants, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

Few of those Americans on the national waiting list for a kidney transplant may ever be so blessed.

Receiving a kidney from a live donor is in itself a blessing. The life expectancy for recipients of kidneys from live donors is reported to be significantly longer than in cases where a cadaver kidney is transplanted.

Good fortune aside, both Cooper and Rider experienced no small amount of pain, suffering and anxiety before their successful transplants were performed. Both faced long sessions in dialysis if donors were not found.

“I struggled through the first two months of 2010 with horrible fatigue,” said Rider, a former Santa Rosa Police officer whose career in law enforcement ended with an injury. “I had pain in my neck and chest. Brianna took me to the emergency room (at St. Helena Hospital in Clearlake). They ran all the cardiac tests and didn’t find anything until a biopsy showed I had a renal (kidney) failure.”

Cooper passed a kidney stone 30 years ago. But he was unaware that his kidneys were malfunctioning until undergoing a test measuring how effectively creatinine (vital to the balance of muscular and neuromuscular function) is removed from the blood by the kidneys.

“My creatinine got so high that I started getting headaches and just feeling terrible,” he said. “I was on the donor waiting list for approximately a year. There was concern over how fast my health was deteriorating. Without a new kidney, my understanding was that I would be in dialysis three days a week for three hours at a time. For me, because of my lifestyle, that would be like a century in prison.”

Cooper praised the abiding care he has received from Marc Shapiro, a prominent Lake County physician, who, he said, “monitored every part of my body” for the last 16 years.

For Rider there are “still challenges” at his earlier stage of recovery. “In a transplant one thing leads to another,” he said. “There’s an adjustment. I take a lot of medication – 29 pills a day, which is down from about 50 a day.”

Newton said that since donating her kidney to Cooper she has connected with literally hundreds of individuals willing to be donors of bone marrow, liver or kidneys.

But she added, “I think a lot of people are reluctant to donate kidneys and that’s unfortunate when 18 people a day die waiting for transplants.”

Cooper’s daughter, Jacqueline Snyder, an attorney, became the catalyst to his kidney connection through unflagging determination, little knowing when she took on that role that her friend Newton would fulfill her father’s need.

“Jacqueline looked me in the eye and said, ‘Dad, I’m going to find you a kidney,’” Cooper recalled. “The first thing she did was go on Facebook and say ‘Mark Cooper needs a kidney.’”

Before the search ended with a “find,” Cooper’s need was trumpeted throughout his wide circle of friends and associates.

The Redwood Empire Dental Society, for which he was president, made Cooper’s case a front-page issue in its newsletter.

“It read ‘Mark Cooper needs a kidney’,” he said, “and then when I received the kidney the front page said, ‘Mark Cooper got a kidney.’

“I don’t know if it’s providence or what, but somebody’s looking over me,” said Cooper. “When your kidney fails you (try to) find someone within the family because that’s your best chance of finding a match. But that couldn’t be because the family member might have the same problem. When it shows up later in life as a kidney disease your own kids cannot be the donor. So we had to look outside of the family to get a kidney.”

With Newton’s kidney becoming such a critical part of Cooper’s continued wellness, it has come to have an identity of its own.

The kidney was given a name – “Angelina” – and the first anniversary of the transplant was celebrated on Tuesday, March 26.

At the same time, Cooper and the 31-year-old Newton have developed a familial-style relationship.

Before the transplant, Newton had met Cooper a couple of times. “I wouldn’t say we were close, but I knew him and his wife Janice,” Newton said. “I’d gone over to their house to visit.

“Mark does a lot of things in the community,” she added. “I wanted to donate, but I wanted it to be to someone who took care of themselves. Other than his kidney, he was a very healthy person. That was a very big point.”

Regarding the surgery she underwent in donating the kidney, she said, “People want to make a big deal out of it, but it really wasn’t a big deal. I’m actually healthier today than I was before.”

While Cooper was en route to UC Davis where his transplant procedure was performed, he wrote a letter of gratitude to Newton, promising her to continue in his service to the community and resume his healthy lifestyle.

Healthy lifestyle, indeed.

“My motto came from Auntie Mame,” said Cooper. “Life is a banquet and most poor slobs starve to death.

“Name something I haven’t done,” he challenged. “I’ve flown airplanes, swam across Clearlake, played water polo, I ski, I Rollerblade … ”

At age 61, Cooper also is a member of the board of directors of more community and regional organizations than most people can name.

He opened his dental practice in Clearlake in 1974 straight out of Pacific University in San Francisco and has been an active member of the community ever since.

The 44-year-old Rider and Curtis served together on the board of directors of the aforementioned HVL church before Curtis moved to Arcata. It was during that time that Curtis noticed Rider’s fading health.

“He was sick all the time,” Curtis recalled of the period just before he volunteered for the transplant. “He could barely walk and his kidneys weren’t functioning. He was hoping to get a donor after his doctor told him he was going to have to have a kidney replaced.”

Rider remembered, “Steve just said, ‘Hey, I’d love to fix this if I could.’ He got tested and 11 months later we did the transplant.”

Because he is a veteran of 10 years of active/inactive duty in the Navy, Rider’s transplant was performed at the naval hospital in Portland, Ore. six months ago. He spent two months convalescing at the VA Medical Center in Vancouver, Wash.

Rider expects to be totally recovered in a year.

Asked if he feels closer to Curtis since the kidney transplant, Rider said, “Yeah, well we share the same body parts. And I don’t like the same foods that I did before. Like onions. I used to love them. Now I don’t.”

April is “National Donate Life Month.” To learn more visit www.donatelife.net or www.donatelifecalifornia.org .

Email John Lindblom at jlindblom@mchsi.com

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