Kiara Brown - 35
“When we got that phone call, everything lifted. I could see her spirit lifting. Her attitude changed. She was telling everyone, ‘I’m going to get a new kidney.’ My family has been through so much. This was just God-sent."
“Everything really started with Kiara when she was 11.
“One day she was eating pizza and started complaining about her chest hurting. I gave her something for heartburn, but a couple of days later, it was still bothering her. I took her to the pediatrician and he diagnosed her with gastritis. Before that she was just laying around the house and moping, which was unusual because she was a very active child. I had just bought her a basketball goal, and she wouldn’t even go out and play on it or anything, and I knew something was going on.
“The doctors told me not to give her anything spicy, greasy or fried and limit her milk products. I did all of that, and she was still laying around the house. I called the pediatrician a few days later and told them she was still the same; she was still moping around not getting any better.
“They said if it continued to bring her back in two days later. So, a couple of days later, my sister took her back while I was at work. When they got to the doctor’s office, Kiara was breathing heavily and was very, very weak. She was holding her chest. They took an x-ray of her chest and found out she had an enlarged heart, and they told us we needed to get her to the Children’s Hospital in Jackson, Mississippi.
“When my sister brought her back home, I immediately left work and took her. The doctor there came in and told us her blood pressure was through the roof and said it wasn’t good. The doctor told me she had gone into kidney failure. I thought right then and there that my world was gone.
“They did an immediate emergency dialysis because they said her system was poisoned. Her creatinine level was very poor. That was the beginning of it all for us. She ended up in ICU for about two weeks. The doctors were trying to give us a little hope at first and said the kidneys might go back to functioning properly after doing the dialysis, but that never happened.
“She had to start hemodialysis. They then introduced us to peritoneal dialysis, and that’s what we ultimately went with. My grandpa had gone through hemodialysis when he got sick, and I thought it was awful. I thought doing the peritoneal dialysis at home while she slept was the best way for us to go.
“We battled her blood pressure for three years. She had seizures, loss of vision, loss of hearing, but it was all just temporary. Her blood pressure was so high she had three seizures. The doctor didn’t think we were dialyzing her properly, but we were. Her body was just not cooperating with her dialysis. It wasn’t getting the toxins off.
“We got a phone call from UAB about three years after she started dialysis and were told they had a cadaver kidney. She received that kidney transplant and three years later, her senior year, she contracted BK virus. At the time, they didn’t know a lot about BK virus. They told us there were very, very few kidney transplant patients that contract that virus.
“They caught the virus in her bloodstream, and it attacked the kidney so much that it was functioning at only 60 percent. It eventually went to 30 percent and her body just couldn’t fight off that virus. In 2006 they removed the kidney. We’ve been on the kidney transplant list until they called us in the fall of 2014 and told us it was time to come up for a review.
“We’ve been coming to UAB for eight years, and in December 2014, they told us we had a donor. I started saying, ‘Thank you, Jesus,’ over and over. Kiara had gotten to the point where nothing mattered anymore. She wasn’t suicidal, but she was depressed. She just couldn’t live her life the way she wanted to live it.
“When we got that phone call, everything lifted. I could see her spirit lifting. Her attitude changed. She was telling everyone, ‘I’m going to get a new kidney.’ My family has been through so much. This was just God-sent. We think so much of Belinda Beasley, Kiara’s donor. She’s just heaven-sent.
“Kiara is doing wonderful now. She gets up every morning and doesn’t sleep late. She goes places now she didn’t want to go before. She’s a whole different child — totally different. Her attitude about life is better. She’s not sickly anymore. She feels good. You don’t have to dread dialysis. It has made all the difference in the world. Our family is so thankful.
“We’ve been through a lot, Kiara’s been through a lot, but God keeps on blessing us. He sees us through it all. Without Mrs. Belinda, I don’t know what we would have done. I can’t be any more grateful.”