Woodville Ohio Man Offers Gift Of Life To His Sister

On Thursday, Kelly, Dan, and the rest of the family will rise early (if anyone will have slept at all) and leave their homes in plenty of time to arrive at Medical College Hospitals by 6 a.m.

Surgeons will then take a kidney from the brother and transplant it into the sister.

It won't cure Kelly's cystinosis, the rare disease she has lived with all her life. But doctors hope the new kidney will return her to relative good health for many more years - just as her first transplant did, back in 1985.

As for Dan, the chance to be an organ donor for the sister he dotes on is, he admits, both exhilarating and terrifying. The day he got the call telling him test results pronounced him a suitable match, his girlfriend called his mother.

"She said, "I think you better come down here," Karen Timbrook remembers. And so she left the Woodville house she shares with her husband, Matt Timbrook, and made her way two blocks over to the house Dan recently bought with his girlfriend, Jackie Halsey.

"Well, I got there, and he just collapsed in my arms. He's afraid. This is a kid who won't get a flu shot. And I said to him, "You know, the three of us are the only ones who know you're a match. You don't have to do this. We could simply say you don't match." But he said, "Mom, I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. It's just not an option."

Karen is a mother, after all, not only to Kelly.

Just as fiercely as she wanted a successful transplant for her daughter, she felt compelled to guard Dan's interests, too. Like being split in half, it was.

"But I had to give him that option," she says. "I couldn't imagine looking at him after the surgery and thinking that he never had any choice in this."

Maybe it would have been easier for Dan to pretend he was without fear. Maybe it takes a certain bravery to admit that deep love for a sibling can indeed be offset by fear and trepidation.

In any case, those toddler lessons about the importance of sharing that Karen gave all four of her kids seem to have stuck.

"The next weekend," Dan says, "Kelly got really sick and went into the hospital, and I thought, "I just can't be scared, not with everything she's been through." I had to get over my fear of needles pretty quick."

One of the first people Dan called for counsel was his father, Gary Horvath - the source of Kelly's first kidney transplant.

"I had very mixed feelings when Danny called me and said he was a match. It's like, you're sitting here and one side of you thinks, "Wonderful news for Kelly!" And then I turn around and look at it from the other way, and I'm thinking, "I know what this is like, and now my son has to go through it."

Dan listened carefully to what his father told him. "He said, "I'm not going to lie, I'm not going to sugar-coat it for you. You're going to be in a lot of pain for a couple of weeks. But look at the trade-off. Kelly gets good health for another 10, 15 years."

Not that the transplant will end each of the health problems cystinosis brings.

The Cystinosis Foundation estimates that some 2,000 people worldwide have the disease, which primarily affects children. A metabolic illness, cystinosis causes amino acid build-up within various organs. Untreated - and this is a difficult disease to diagnose - children with cystinosis can develop end-stage kidney failure before age 10.

In Kelly, according to her kidney specialist, Dr. Deepak Malhotra, cystinosis is "not limited to her kidneys, but that's what is most diseased."

Providing all goes well with her transplant, he adds, his patient's prognosis is good.

Meanwhile, Kelly looks forward to being rid of the relentless fatigue and headaches, the loss of appetite, the thrice-weekly dialysis sessions.

"I'm not scared [of surgery]," Kelly says. "I'm a little nervous. I don't know how much things have changed since the last time. I know on Wednesday night I'm not even going to sleep. But that's all right."

Roberta de Boer's column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Email her at roberta@theblade.com or call 1-419-724-6086.

Copyright © 2001 The Blade.

This article posted February 18, 2001.