Aurora – Nearly 20 years ago, Charlie Richardson did what any parent would do to save his daughter’s life: He donated a kidney to his ailing girl.
Now it is the father who’s reeling. His remaining kidney is 32 percent effective and failing, and he may need a transplant.
“When it’s your child, you don’t give it a thought,” said Richardson, the chief attorney for the city of Aurora. “There’s not much you can do. Your kidney is going to determine what it’s going to do.”
It is a road well-traveled by a family that has been struck three times by kidney disease.
In April 1983, Dianna Richardson was born a sick baby who vomited and had constant diarrhea. In the first 13 days of her life, the girl who weighed 6 pounds at birth lost 2 pounds. Her mother, Kim, brought her to the emergency room.
Doctors learned later Dianna had a rare disease that affects one in 8,000 babies in Finland. Fewer than 400 cases had been discovered in the U.S.
Doctors were blunt after they discovered the disease, Kim Richardson said.
“They said that she won’t live six months, and it will be a miserable six months in the hospital,” she recalled.
It got worse.
Doctors told the parents their elder daughter, 1-year-old Kristin, had the same disease – a rare form of congenital nephrotic syndrome.
The Richardsons aren’t aware of any family ties to Finland, but they didn’t spend much time contemplating the disease.
They attacked it.
The Richardsons located experts at the University of Minnesota. Charlie Richardson, an assistant city attorney back then, worked in Aurora during the week and flew to Minnesota on weekends.
Minnesota doctors treated Dianna, who suffered through numerous bouts of pneumonia. Her teeth rotted away. Her belly swelled. By the time of her first kidney transplant, Dianna’s wrists and ankles were as small as newborn’s.
At age 3, Dianna got her mother’s kidney. Within two years, she rejected that organ. At age 5, she received her father’s kidney. She would keep it for 14 years.
Kristin didn’t need a transplant until she was in fifth grade. That organ came from her aunt, and she kept it for a decade.
Today, the sisters are in college. Dianna has a 4-year-old son. Having rejected their donated kidneys, they’re also both on dialysis, using a machine that cleanses their blood, and are back in line on the donor waiting list. Dianna is high on the list because she is a more difficult match.
“It’s a lifestyle,” said Dianna. “We support each other.”
Their parents divorced. And the sisters’ relationship with their father sometimes was strained, but now he appreciates their support and knowledge as he prepares to enter the world of dialysis and possible transplants.
“My situation is extremely rare,” he said. “Usually, you can donate a kidney and be fine.”
The vast majority of kidney donors never suffer ill effects from their benevolence, said Dr. Stuart Senkfor, a Denver-area nephrologist who treats 53-year-old Charlie Richardson.
Studies cited by the National Kidney Foundation show that just one kidney adequately removes wastes and excess fluid from the blood.
“Mr. Richardson has had bum luck,” Senkfor said. “He appears to be unlucky enough to have donated a kidney and gotten an unrelated kidney disease.”
The biggest risk of living with one kidney is developing high blood pressure, the leading cause of chronic kidney disease.
That’s what Charlie Richardson believes happened to him.
Today, Richardson keeps a blood-pressure machine in his desk. He takes medicine to regulate his hypertension and eats healthily.
Nevertheless, his kidney continues to worsen. “Given enough time, that kidney could wear out,” Senkfor said.
The irony isn’t lost on his friends.
“Years ago, he gave up a kidney in order to assist his daughter,” said Richardson’s friend Steve Hogan. “Now his kids are having to prepare him for what they’ve gone through.”
Kristin is 23, and Dianna is 22. They’re among 775 people in Colorado waiting for kidneys.
“I should be dead after these past two years,” Kristin Richardson said recently. “Everything that could go wrong did.”
It’s a world that Charlie Richardson is now discovering in the first person.
“I’m getting familiar with the procedures,” he said. “I’ve got to be prepared and be ready. They’re kind of both my kidney guides.”
Staff writer Jeremy Meyer can be reached at 303-820-1175 or jpmeyer@denverpost.com.
