TODAY at Minnesota State Mankato is published in May, August and January and mailed to 90,000 alumni and friends. The mission of TODAY is to entertain, inform and connect readers to campus.
Spring 2005
Volume 6 Issue 3
Lives ConnectedThey thought is was the flu.
When Richard Davenport became violently ill at the age of eleven, his parents thought a nasty bug was to blame. But when he didn't get better, they took him to see a doctor. The doctor ran a few tests, diagnosed him with an acute onset of nephritis—a broad term for kidney infection—and sent him straight to the hospital.
"I swelled up like a balloon," Davenport remembers. "I was swollen up from all the fluids that my kidneys weren't kicking out. At that time, there was no treatment for kidney infections. Dialysis wasn't available, so it was a very serious situation."
Somehow, after thirteen weeks in the hospital, Davenport recovered enough to be sent home; a few months later, he was well enough to return to school. Year after year passed without another infection. Davenport finished high school, then college.
He got his master's degree, then his doctor of philosophy degree in higher education administration. After years of experience in administration, he became provost and vice president at Central Michigan University in 1990 and then, in July 2002, president of Minnesota State University, Mankato—all without incident.
In the back of his mind, Davenport always knew that his kidneys had been permanently damaged by that infection. But he felt good. He had no need for drugs, dialysis or medical intervention of any kind. He had routine checkups with his physicians, but they agreed that his kidney problems were "dormant." Even when his blood pressure starting rising ("a sure sign of end-stage kidney disease," Davenport says), no one fussed much. It was progressing at such a slow rate that Davenport's doctors told him he may not have to worry about it in his lifetime.
Then, not quite three years ago, things changed. Quite suddenly, Davenport's kidneys began failing, and his doctors began worrying. "They said that if it continued at this rate, I would lose my kidney function," he remembers. "And it continued to drop off. The real significant drop occurred this past year. Up until then, I was probably operating on roughly fifty percent kidney function, and then it really dropped. At one time, I got down to eleven percent kidney function."
As his kidneys got weaker, so did he. He looked pale. He started swelling up and gained twenty pounds of fluid in the course of a year. He resisted dialysis, opting instead for drug therapy that helped keep his energy up and his anemia at bay. "I knew that I didn't look healthy," he says. "I could tell when I looked in the mirror. I would look at myself and say 'Who the hell is this guy?'"
He also knew that others on campus were beginning to wonder the same thing. He had never discussed his condition with University officials, he says, because it had never been an issue. But he had begun to hear the buzz; he knew that people—faculty, staff and others—were asking about his health. So he decided to go public.
"I never would have done this if it hadn't been for the discussion that was going on on campus," he says. "I thought, I've really got to let people know."
It was cancer.
Ginny Fitzloff's stepfather was dying. He had been diagnosed with terminal bonemarrow cancer in February of 1998. Doctors gave him two years, but by October of that same year, he was in kidney failure. "It was a result of all the treatments," Fitzloff says. "But when he went into kidney failure, they found out he only had one kidney—the other had never developed from birth."
He wasn't eligible for a transplant. He was already crippled with pain and exhausted from the aggressive treatment of his disease. Within days, he'd passed away.
"It was at that time that I decided I was going to do one or the other—donate a kidney or bone marrow," Fitzloff says. "I started with the Sioux Falls hospital in 2000 just to be a match, for whoever."
Then she fell in love with a man who only had one kidney. He had donated the other one to his mother more than twenty years earlier, just after he turned eighteen. Although he had been healthy since the transplant, Ginny immediately discontinued the process in South Dakota, so that her kidney could be available for him should he ever need it.
The couple got married on July 3, 2004. On July 11, they moved into his late mother's house in St. Clair. On July 12, Fitzloff started her job as an administrative assistant in the President's Office at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
The right type.
O-positive blood is the most common type in the United States; the American Association of Blood Banks reports that 38 percent of the U.S. population is O-positive. And because type O blood can be given to any of the other blood types—A, AB and B—in an emergency, people with type O blood are considered universal donors.
The same is true when it comes to kidney donations. Generally speaking, people with type O blood can donate kidneys to people with any other blood type—A, AB, B and O. But when a person with type O blood needs a kidney transplant, they have only one choice: another person with type O blood.
Richard Davenport has type O-positive blood. So does Ginny Fitzloff.
Fitzloff figured that out as the rest of the community was digesting the news of Davenport's illness, thanks to a front-page news story in The Free Press on September 16, 2004. The article mentioned that the University president needed a kidney transplant, that none of his own family members was a proper match and that he would have to undergo daily dialysis if no donor were found in the near future. It also mentioned his status as type O-positive.
"I went home, talked to my husband and prayed about it," Fitzloff says. "The next day I was going to stop by and talk to him, but then he had someone in his office and I had to leave, so I e-mailed him. I offered to throw my hat in the ring."
"I remember getting that e-mail," Davenport says. "I remember that I thought to myself, 'I hardly even know her.'"
Several people had already offered to become live-organ donors for Davenport, including many colleagues from Central Michigan University. All of them were longtime friends, people he knew well. He had met Ginny barely two months earlier. "I wanted to know what her motivation was," he says. "I wanted to know if it was authentic. And after Ginny shared her background, I knew it wasn't just an idle offer; I knew she was very serious about it and apparently had thought a lot about it. That was very convincing for me."
Fitzloff began the testing process a week later. When her blood came back as a "negative crossmatch," which means that there was no reaction between donor and recipient, she scheduled an all-day appointment at the Transplant Clinic of the Fairview-University Medical Center in Minneapolis. "We left at 5:30 in the morning," she says. "We didn't get home until after supper."
That appointment included further testing, a complete physical assessment, and consultations with social workers, surgeons, and nurses to gauge whether or not she was mentally ready for the procedure. The transplant team talked to her about the dangers of the surgery—and plainly pointed out the lack of benefit for her. "The surgeon told me that with most major surgeries you can tell the patient the risks and the benefits," she says. "But then he said, 'In your case, there are no benefits. There are only risks. And the first one is that you could die.'"
A week later, on October 28, the Transplant Clinic called the President's Office to give Ginny the thumbs up. President Davenport was in a cabinet meeting and Ginny Fitzloff had just stepped across the hall to talk to Human Resources. Jan Eimers, secretary to the president, answered the phone.
"Jan called over to Human Resources and said, 'Get over here, it's the Transplant Clinic on the phone,'" Fitzloff remembers.
Three weeks later, on November 23, with President Davenport's duties in the capable hands of MSU's Vice President for Academic Affairs Scott Olson and the rest of campus clearing out for Thanksgiving break, Fitzloff and Davenport were in separate operating rooms at Fairview-University Medical Center. In one, a team of surgeons was removing a perfectly healthy kidney from a perfectly healthy woman. In the other, another team of surgeons was preparing to tuck that kidney under the leg muscle of a very sick man.
The supportive public.
The surgery made headlines in Mankato, of course. It was the focus of a WCCO-TV broadcast the next day. And, thanks to the Associated Press and other wire services, it was also news from Miami to Phoenix and in dozens of other cities in between. The timing helped: the surgery took place two days before Thanksgiving, and many of the stories reflected the "Thanksgiving gift" theme. Whatever the angle, however, both patients were pleased by the attention their story received.
"We didn't mind the publicity," Davenport says. "We both really wanted to convey to the public that the success rate in transplant surgeries is extremely high and that the risk level for donors who are healthy is extremely small. There are 60,000 patients out there who are waiting for kidneys, and we really wanted to be able to tell a positive story. So we both felt good about the publicity we were getting statewide."
In the weeks that followed the surgery, both Davenport and Fitzloff received hundreds of cards, notes, plants, flowers and other gifts. Many came from people they had never met, others from long lost friends. Many were from members of the University community—including several student groups—and many more from people in the Mankato area. The support and encouragement were beyond anything either of them could have imagined.
"I heard from people I hadn't seen or heard from in twenty or thirty years," Davenport reports. "A friend read about it in the Miami Herald, someone else saw it in the Phoenix newspaper. ... I got a handwritten note from the governor, wishing me well. I got a lot from people I had never even met. I have a sack full of cards and letters that I'm keeping."
"Me too," Fitzloff adds. "I got handmade cards and lots of personal notes. I got hundreds of plants and flowers. Just last week I got an e-mail from someone in Colorado Springs who had read about it and was going through the same sort of thing. I couldn't believe that someone in Colorado was reading about me."
Both of them hope that people who hear their story will have a greater understanding of the transplant process. Neither dwells on the pain of the procedure or the length of the recovery—both very real concerns in a major abdominal surgery. Instead, they prefer to point out how very possible it is to do this, even for people you don't know or aren't related to.
"I would really like people to know that you can do this—you really can," Fitzloff says. She didn't have to pay for anything—including gas or food—during the whole procedure and was back at work within a month of the operation. She was exercising as usual by January and could laugh as hard as she wanted despite the scar across her stomach. "It really is doable."
Back to normal.
President Davenport was back in his office on the third floor of Wigley Administration Center within two months of his surgery. His color was good and his energy high. He was moving from meeting to meeting, going to lunch appointments and, after being cleared for regular exercise late in January, fitting in a light daily workout. Although he was still tired by the end of the day, the fatigue was nothing compared to what it had been in the months before the surgery.
"The biggest difference is the alertness," he says. "Before the transplant, I was so tired and not as alert. Now, I'm thinking much more clearly. I'm thinking ahead more. My energy level is so much higher—especially my mental energy."
Now, he's ready to pick up where he left off before the surgery in November—and is grateful to the people who kept his office and the University moving ahead in his absence. Scott Olson, who was named acting president by the Minnesota State Colleges & Universities chancellor during Davenport's absence, did "an absolutely superb job," Davenport says. Cabinet members also stepped up temporarily to fill his place on the many boards and committees he sits on locally and statewide.
"The staff at this University, in this office, and the vice presidents did a superb job of protecting us while we were away," he says. "They really covered us well and handled a lot of issues that came up without getting me involved. In terms of our agenda and our initiatives, everything moved forward. We didn't miss a beat."
Davenport doesn't intend to miss any beats in the future either. His doctors told him as he left the hospital that he was a very healthy man who would probably never have to worry about his kidneys again. That doesn't mean, however, that he won't often think about the kidney that has given him a completely new outlook on life.
"When you're ill, you just live day to day," he says. "When you start to feel better, you really want to live each day and get the most out of it. I have no reason to be sad or depressed. I'm happier than I've ever been. I feel good. I feel lucky. I am lucky, to say the least."
Although he makes a point of treating Ginny no differently than anyone else in the office (she in fact reports to another staff member), he remains humbled by the magnitude of her gift to him. "When I think about what Ginny did for me, it's just monumental that she did this, that she made this gift out of her own personal and spiritual beliefs. It's just incredible to me."
Sara Gilbert is a freelance writer and editor whose work includes the popular Newsmakers section for each issue of TODAY and editing the Minnesota Twins' magazine.
