Organ Transplants Gave Man A Life To Give

By Diwata Fonte

The Fresno Bee

When doctors said they had a liver and kidney for him, 55-year-old Robert Katz of Lindsay felt uneasy that his luck was another's loss.

He started to cry.

"I was scared because someone had to die," the long-time hepatitis C sufferer said.

However, Katz salves those feelings by dedicating his extended life to organ donation.

As part of the California Transplant Donor Network, he speaks of his donor, whose identity he does not know, and his twin brother, Ronald, who died while on an organ transplant waiting list.

Katz will share his story with religious groups as part of National Donor Sabbath this weekend.

According to the network, more than 80,000 people are on organ transplant waiting lists nationwide. A new name is added every 13 minutes.

In Northern and Central California, more than 8,000 people are waiting for organ transplants.

Katz, who shares these statistics to help others still on waiting lists, is not proud of the early part of his life.

During the "hippie times" in San Francisco, he used intravenous drugs and had numerous unsterilized tattoos and piercings that he believes gave him hepatitis C.

"I'm not proud of it. I'm ashamed of it," he said. However, "I'm not that person anymore."

He went through decades of illness knowing that hepatitis C would take over his body.

Doctors told him many times that he and his twin brother, who contracted the disease separately, could die.

By the 1990s, comas would overtake his conscious thoughts. Staring at a blank screen, he'd tell his wife, Linda, "I'm watching cowboys and Indians."

Robert and Ronald Katz, who were "tighter than any two siblings," signed onto various organ transplant waiting lists at hospitals around the state.

However, Ronald Katz developed an infection that prevented organ transplants.

"He told me to go ahead and get my transplant and live for both of us," Robert Katz said.

After being bounced from hospital to hospital around the state, Katz found himself two miles away from his birthplace, where doctors told him about his donor. It was 5 p.m. Sept. 1, 2001.

All Robert Katz knows about the donor who gave him a liver, a kidney and an extension on life is that he died in an accident and his organs came from Fresno.

A priest told him to let God take care of life and death.

Katz said, "It's not our say who dies and who stays alive. The gift of life is so precious."

The reporter can be reached at dfonte@fresnobee.com or 622-2419.

Copyright © 2003 The Fresno Bee.

This article posted November 27, 2003.