• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

All in the Family: BellSouth VP Giving Kidney to Her Father

Posted on: Tuesday, 17 January 2006, 09:01 CST

By Tim Chitwood, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Ga.

Jan. 17--Merriell Jenkins anticipates craving a margarita, no salt, every Wednesday.

That's if getting another person's kidney also transplants the donor's delights, in which case that no-salt part is just as well: Excess sodium is one of the things failing kidneys cease to filter from the blood.

Not that Merriell, 64, will be short of kidneys after his transplant operation. He'll have three, one from a woman almost half his age.

Doctors will not remove his two diseased kidneys when they plug in one donated by Camille Russo, 34 -- his youngest daughter, the talented child who once thought of becoming a singer, before her father advised her first to get the means to pursue her dreams.

He recalls putting that advice this way: "It's nice to like your job, but you'll like your job a whole lot better if you make pretty good money at it."

Role reversal

However he put it, she took his advice. She majored in finance at the University of Georgia and kept singing on the side. Now a vice president with BellSouth, she sang soprano with the 200-member Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus on its Grammy-winning recording of Hector Berlioz's Requiem.

"It has definitely been good advice, because I like what I do a lot, but it allows me the means to do the things that I love," Russo said.

Her father gave her the guidance to get where she is now. Now she can give him a longer life.

That has been easier for her to deal with than for him.

That margarita joke, the one about taking on the traits of the organ donor, shows he's adjusting to knowing Russo is the one who will do this for him. He had thought it might be one of his sisters, ages 63, 67 and 71. Before they learned Russo was the match, father and daughter had joked about what impulses he might get from his siblings. In one case they thought he might be a little more careful with his money.

That's funny because Merriell Jenkins seems to have learned that long ago, long before he and his daughter, then a college sophomore, talked about her career plans. Unlike his daughter, he did not go to college. He learned from experience. He worked his way up to become a partner in a family-owned grocery in Palmetto, Ga., just up the road from Newnan, where he and wife Carolyn raised a family and now raise horses.

Now retired, he still puts in one day a week at Bradley's Big Buy, running the store on Mondays so the current owners can get a couple of days off. That's where he was last week when his daughter called and told him the news: All the tests showed she was a match. She would be the one to donate the kidney that would extend his life. He cried.

"I wanted a kidney, but I didn't want a kidney from one of my children," he said Saturday. His children were among the first to volunteer, but doctors had told him a sibling's usually the better match. "All my siblings were tested and were turned down. My next best chance for a match was my children," he said.

Meeting the criteria

Any father might struggle with that, but Russo is trying to make it easy for him. Because of his predicament, she started researching organ donation, and since has decided that if her dad didn't need a kidney, she would donate one to someone who did.

That call to her father last week was a long time coming. Among those screened were friends, nephews, a niece and a cousin. The preparations are rigorous and time-consuming. "If somebody just says, 'Well, I want to give daddy a kidney,' it just doesn't work that way," the father said.

There are blood tests, stress tests, transplant classes, psychological evaluations. "They send you through the mill making sure that everything is going to be all right," he said. The surgery at Atlanta's Emory University Hospital has not been scheduled yet.

'Purpose of my life'

In a sense he has waited 20 years for this, discovering two decades ago during a Red Cross blood drive at the Palmetto Baptist Church that his blood screening wasn't normal. The nurse there told him he needed to see a doctor, so he did.

Physicians began tracking his kidney function, which gradually has declined. Now it's down to about 16 percent. Yet his symptoms are few. He feels nauseated sometimes after meals. Otherwise he has an active life, regularly going on horse rides and bike rides. "I feel good most all the time," he said.

This past Christmas, Russo gave him his first brand-new bicycle. He had told her the story of getting what he thought was a new green bike one Christmas when he was a child. Then a friend pointed out that it lacked a crossbar, that in fact it was his sister's old bike, repainted.

When he comes to visit Russo in Columbus, they go for rides on the Chattahoochee Riverwalk, usually with 7-year-old Drake Neel, the son of Russo's sister, Rebecca Neel.

Russo is glad now that she can make this difference in her father's life. He made a difference in hers.

"As I began to go through the testing, my prayers were very specifically that when God formed me, this was part of his purpose for me -- that I would match and be a great match and even a perfect match, so that he wouldn't even have to take anti-rejection drugs," she said Friday. "I really feel like this is exactly one part of the purpose of my life."

And though her father will have to adjust to her doing this for him, he'll likely live long enough to get over it.

It might be something they can joke about, some Wednesday, as they go out for margaritas -- no salt. Find out more about kidney donation from The National Kidney Foundationof Georgia, online at http://www.nkfg.org [http://www.nkfg.org]

-----

Copyright (c) 2006, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Ga.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

NYSE:BLS,

Source: Columbus Ledger-Enquirer

More News in this Category