Once strangers, 2 Duke Energy colleagues bond over kidney transplant
This weekly column is a lookaround Butler and Warren counties from Enquirer Reporter Keith BieryGolick. Send tips, questions and comments to kbierygolick@enquirer.com.
Kidney donor: ‘Am I dying?’
There was a tube down her throat and another one up her nose.
Doctors strapped her down, they said, so she wouldn’t rip them out.
She felt like she was drowning.
Almost a month before, Jerri Kurdila had donated one of her kidneys to a stranger. The Trenton resident was released from the hospital, but threw up 14 times in a little more than a day when she got home.
Back at the hospital, doctors eventually forced Kurdila into a coma after her she developed an infection, her lung collapsed and she got pneumonia. Friends and family had to wear hospital gowns and masks to visit.
When she woke up, she couldn’t talk. She also couldn't drink.
Her husband Mike brought in an orange pop, her favorite kind. She wrote him a note, asking for a sip, even though she knew she couldn't.
Later, she wrote him another note:
“Am I dying?”
Her husband looked at the note and then back at her.
“No, no, no. You're going to make it,” Mike Kurdila said, before pausing. "I have to go to the bathroom."
He walked out of the room and cried. He thought he had lied to his wife.
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It looked like a burnt steak and potato.
That’s how Mike Kurdila described it. A few weeks earlier, a doctor held it up like a baby, cradling it with two cupped hands like one might take communion.
This was Eric Amshoff’s kidney. It was bigger than a football, and the potato was a cyst. A healthy kidney should weigh about five ounces. Amshoff’s weighed 13 pounds. His other kidney weighed 9 pounds.
He has polycystic kidney disease, a hereditary condition that killed his father more than 20 years ago.
Amshoff was on dialysis, a treatment which cycles blood in and out of the body, regulating his waste and water because his kidneys couldn't.
Shotgun blasts to the legs; that's how Amshoff described the cramps the treatment caused.
He would go to a dialysis center at 5:30 a.m. and leave at 10 a.m., but his day was already ruined. He often looked around and saw people 20 years older than him. He saw needles jolt out of their arms and blood erupt to the ceiling. He saw people taken away in an ambulance.
On more than one occasion, he was taken away in an ambulance. If he died in his sleep, he often thought, he wouldn't mind.
“It’s not much of a life,” he said.
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Amshoff and Kurdila have a running joke about poop. More precisely, it’s about who soiled their hospital bed first. Because they both have.
The pair work together at Duke Energy in Monroe. Two years ago, they didn’t know each other. Kurdila knew Amshoff had a big sense of humor, but Amshoff usually works in the field.
They were essentially strangers.
In 2015, Kurdila began seeing his face on posters around the office, asking for a kidney donation. She got tested.
Kurdila always wanted to be an organ donor. Even before her three-month-old son died on Christmas Eve.
A victim of sudden infant death syndrome, her child died in his bassinet. It was 1992. When her family got home from the hospital, her father took the crib into their backyard and chopped it to pieces with an ax.
When Kurdila talks about Ryan, she mentions his corneas. They were the only organs he was able to donate. The thought that another child out there can see because of him gives Kurdila strength.
In Amshoff, she can see for herself the impact she made.
She gave Amshoff her kidney in a transplant surgery on March 1, her birthday. She chose that date on purpose, so she would have something else to celebrate.
It happened a year ago, and it almost killed her. But after three surgeries and four months off work, she's fully recovered. And she's gained a lifelong friendship.
Kurdila and her husband go to dinner with Amshoff and his wife once a month. They celebrated her birthday this year at Newport on the Levee and have been planning a cruise together.
“I’m closer with her than I am with my own sister,” Amshoff said.
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Amshoff’s father died in 1993 after complications from his kidney transplant. He was buried with a softball in his casket.
That's what brought Amshoff and his father together. Amshoff started playing when he was 18 and continued playing on his dad's work team until his death. It was often the only time they saw each other most weeks.
Amshoff remembers when hospital workers wheeled his father back for one final dialysis treatment and surgery. He was talking about playing softball again.
He never did.
When Amshoff recovered from his kidney transplant, he started playing softball again. He's 50 years old, and his knees ache after games. He's not sure how much longer he'll play.
"I just wanted to come back and end on my terms," he said.
Because his dad never did.
Follow Enquirer Reporter Keith BieryGolick @kbierygolick. Send tips, questions and comments to kbierygolick@enquirer.com