Samantha Hatvany — Kidney Search Foundation

Who Am I?

I am a married mom of 3. Two of my kids are still at home: my oldest has cerebral palsy and is permanently disabled, and my youngest is 18 and just graduated. I’ve taught high school for 35 years. I’m a docent and general volunteer at the community for mentally disabled adults where my oldest son attends a daily work program, and I’m actively involved with my church. I’m a happy, busy, and very blessed woman.

My Interests:

I love to travel; we’re trying to visit all of the national parks, and we’ve passed the half-way mark. I enjoy cooking, and my husband and I enjoy taking cooking classes together. I’m an avid reader. We’ve got two dogs, and I love weekly trips to the dog park. I also love the benefits of big city life: we’re theater ticket holders, I take wonderful Continuing Ed. Classes at Rice University, and we love taking our son to our minor league Space Cowboy games , so he can cheer at the top of his lungs!

My Diagnosis:

I got gestational diabetes with my second pregnancy that just never went away. I was hyper-sensitive to most medications and even synthetic insulin gave me hives. Then a developing class of meds received FDA approval, and at last after 16 years of poor control, my diabetes was able to be tightly managed, and my A1C stayed below 6—and it killed my kidneys. When I met my nephrologist, I was already tipping out of stage 3 into stage 4 CKD. I joined the transplant list in 2018. My body tied the proverbial knot and hung on for the next 5 years. I was hoping to match with a living donor before I began dialysis, but this month I lost that race.

How A Kidney Transplant Will Affect My Life:

My day-to-day life is very busy. My permanently disabled son requires full-physical care in addition to his mental development arrest at the toddler stage. As of my onset of dialysis, I can no longer offer physical assistance getting him into his wheelchair or up on the furniture. This isn’t just an inconvenience practically, it’s also a bit of a hazard potential, and it’s somewhat of a grevious loss in our interaction that he cannot comprehend.

Also, dialysis really takes up a full-third of my day. It ties me down and has to be my primary consideration when I’m making plans. For example, I now have to go to late-night activities on Fridays that I normally would have scheduled on Saturdays because I have to get all my dialysis in before time to go to church.

Also, my husband and I have retirement plans that include a lot of travel. We had to cancel a tour to the Holy Lands led by our minister because my journey with dialysis was too new-there wasn’t time to make international preparations to travel with all my dialysis supplies. Even though on our national park journeys, those arrangements will be much easier to make, boy would it be so much easier with a working kidney instead.

I have two pair/share donors waiting to share their kidneys. I’m a tough match with my elevated PRA (I had 8 pregnancies), but I’m exploring options for reducing my antibodies.