Kidney transplant goes swimmingly

Kalee Glennon thought seeing Hilary Duff in concert, courtesy of "Make a Wish Foundation," was the high point of her 8 years. Less than a day later, she unexpectedly received a working kidney. And that, she concedes, is even better.

Friday, the little girl and pals Audrey and Bethany Ahlers went swimming — something that Kalee was not allowed to do for so long because she was on dialysis and couldn't immerse the port through which her blood was filtered. As the Whittier Elementary third-grader splashed and sloshed and floated in the water, her smile said good times seem — finally — to have arrived.

Her journey has been one of almost unspeakable heartbreak and joy.

When Kalee was born, she had only one kidney and it was malformed, never working right. When she was 18 months old, her grandpa gave her one of his kidneys. And for a while, things seemed to be all right, though she was always too small, too fragile. Then her body rejected that kidney and she went back on dialysis, three days a week, four hours a day. It made it hard for a little girl to spend much time in school, which she dearly loved. And it made her a little different from her friends, which she didn't love.

But Kalee's a sociable creature, a fighter, a stoic. She brought all those traits to bear.

And life was even more complicated than that. In 1999, when her family lived in Elko and traveled to University Hospital for treatment and dialysis, they were in a terrible car crash. Her mother's spinal cord was severed, her head severely cut. Jill Glennon was in the hospital and rehabilitation for three months. Kalee's brother Kyle, who was 13, died. Kalee's maternal grandparents, Pinky and JoAnn Herzog, took care of her until Jill, who now used a wheelchair, healed and then grew strong enough in both body and spirit to reclaim the role of mom. Eventually, Jill and Kalee moved to Salt Lake City to be closer to the clinic.

That early transplant, which had saved Kalee then, made getting a new working kidney harder. She built up antibodies — it always happens with a transplant — and that makes any subsequent kidney match much more difficult. That's one reason that on two different occasions they got the call that a kidney seemed to be available, a transplant imminent, followed by a call saying "never mind," says Pam Grant, a social worker at the kidney transplant and dialysis center at the U., which also has the region's only pediatric kidney dialysis program.

Kalee would show up for her dialysis and play with her "kidney friends" and watch and smile as, one by one, they got transplants and left dialysis and she stayed behind, Grant says. It must have seemed like she'd never get a turn.