Marshall will give her father one of her kidneys this week. Mike Argento


When he was 16, Charlie Marshall was playing baseball when he went to make a catch in the outfield.

Suddenly, he couldn't see. He was blind. Just like that. One moment he was fine, the next he wasn't.

His parents took him to the hospital in Frederick, Maryland, where they were living at the time. Charlie's father, Larry, was a career Navy man, 20 years in the service, and that was home at that moment.

The doctors weren't sure what happened to Charlie. His blood pressure was abnormal and there were some other things. But they couldn't pinpoint the cause, at least initially.

It took about month of tests to figure out what had happened. Charlie's kidneys were not functioning properly. They stopped growing when he younger, possibly when he suffered from a high fever when he got sick once as a child, and had ceased to function.

He went on dialysis and began waiting for a kidney to become available for transplant. It was back in the early '80s, and back then the kidney transplant list wasn't national. He had to wait for somebody to die at that hospital and hope that the person was an organ donor and that the kidney was a match.

He was on the list for a couple of years. After graduating from high school, he went to Ocean City, Maryland, and his family all worried whether it would be safe for him to go into the ocean with the dialysis port in his side.

The winter after he graduated, he got a kidney, what's called a cadaver kidney, from a 10-year-old boy who died from an unspecified ailment or accident. The family never found out how the boy died.

They all thought that was it. Charlie got a kidney and he'd be set for the rest of his life.

He wasn't.

Five years later, the organ stopped working and he needed another kidney.

His mother, My, stepped forward. Charlie is her son and she didn't want him going back onto a waiting list, with all of the uncertainty that came with it.

The transplant was a success. When she came home from the hospital, her daughter Heather recalled, they all thought she'd have to take it easy for a while. Instead, she grabbed her purse and went out to play Bingo.

That kidney lasted 10 years. Heather, at the time, was pregnant with her youngest, and she asked her doctors that if they did a C-section, could they go in and get one of her kidneys for her brother while they were there. The doctors said that wasn't how it worked.

Instead, Charlie's younger sister Diane donated one of her kidneys.

That kidney is still going strong 17 years later. The doctors told him he could expect 20 years from the organ. So in three years, he might need another kidney.

Heather said he has scars all over his torso and used to tell her kids that they came from being in the war or when he ran into some pirates.

And that was that.

Until a couple of years ago when Larry got sick. He had served in Vietnam and had been exposed to Agent Orange. That, apparently, was coming home to roost, damaging his kidneys to the point that they had ceased to function.

He went on dialysis and awaited a donor. It's been a difficult wait. The father of one of Heather's co-workers at Delmarva Power – she lives in West York and works in Delaware – had kidney disease tied to Agent Orange exposure. He did not live long enough to get a new kidney.

Her father, who lives near Bedford in western Pennsylvania, had just begun enjoying his retirement, and here he was, tied to dialysis every other day.

Heather thought about it. She wanted her father to enjoy his retirement. She volunteered to give him one of her kidneys.

Her parents were against it to begin with. For one thing, they didn't want to put her through the surgery. For another, Larry said, they knew that, eventually, Charlie would need another kidney and she'd be a suitable donor for him.

Heather was pretty insistent. She argued that Charlie's two grown daughters had offered to donate kidneys to their father should it come to that. Heather wanted to do it for her father; she wanted him to enjoy his retirement and not be tied down by needing dialysis every other day.

She wore him down.

That was in April. Since then, Heather has submitted to a battery of tests to make sure she is healthy enough to donate a kidney and that she is psychologically prepared. During one of the meetings with the team of doctors, psychologists, social workers and insurance specialists assigned to her, one of them asked her whether she had been promised any money for her kidney.

She responded, "It's my dad."

After her first round of tests, one of the doctors called her and asked whether she felt OK, whether she felt sick or had a fever. She said she felt fine. The doctor told her that the tests had revealed that her appendix was about to burst and she had to have it removed. Donating a kidney to her father might have saved her own life.

Still, the operation pushed the transplant back as she had to start over with the testing.

So finally, on Thursday, Heather and her father will check into the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the surgeons will remove one of her kidneys and give it to Larry.

The operation is expected to be done just six days after Larry's 75th birthday.

"It's a great birthday present," Larry said.

Heather said, "I just to help my dad. I know how much his life will improve. I just want him to enjoy his retirement."

Larry said, "We're a loving family. We are all very close."

Sharing kidneys is about as close as you can get.


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