Brotherly love gives girl a new kidney


BY LIZA BERGER
KENOSHA NEWS

Qiana Riley has big plans. She wants to be a veterinarian. She is thinking about leaving home-schooling for public high school. And she can’t wait to get back on the ice.

Fifteen-year-old Qiana is like a young woman living for the first time. And in a way she is.

About two months ago, the Kenosha teenager received a new kidney, a transplant that has vastly improved the quality of her life.

“She’s just so much healthier,” her mother, Sharon Riley, said. “She’s not sick anymore … The bad side effects she’s lived with for six years are gone. They’ve disappeared.”

The operation has meant even more to Qiana because the donor was her 19-year-old half-brother, Junior Blow, of Kenosha.

“I think it was brave of him to do it,” Qiana said.

Blow, who has known Qiana since they were young children, didn’t hesitate when her mother asked him to donate.

“I feel it should’ve been done. That’s all. And nobody else was going to do it,” said Blow, who now wants Qiana to go to school dances and experience other teenage rites of passage.

Getting a new kidney has brought some major changes for a girl who had to spend much of her childhood sitting out activities she once had enjoyed. In 1996, when she was 8 and getting ready for an ice-skating competition in Rockford, Ill., when during skating lessons she started feeling tired. Then, the fatigue intensified and she vomited.

Qiana’s pediatrician at the time told her mother that her illness was emotionally related, likely stemming from a recent move to a new home. But after seeing him three times in seven days for her increasingly ill health, Qiana was taken to then-Kenosha Memorial Hospital, where doctors determined she had kidney failure.

Her life had not been the same since. Until her operation in April, Qiana would go to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa three days a week for dialysis treatments. She would get hooked up to the dialysis machine three hours each time. That, combined with travel to and from the hospital and other hospital procedures, took up a significant amount of time.

“It would be like six hours a day,” Qiana said.

The treatments took so much out of Qiana’s day that her mother decided to pull her out of school and home-school her. After the treatments she would be so tired that she could do nothing but lie on the couch.

The dialysis process filters waste products from a person’s blood, physically draining the patient, and the fluid shifts before and after dialysis can cause blood pressure swings. After dialysis, patients often have low blood pressure, said Shelley Chapman, kidney transplant coordinator at Children’s Hospital. Qiana would sometimes come home with her face ashen from the treatment.

Renal disease also carries other issues. Before the transplant, Qiana’s health worsened when a fistula, a pipe that was placed in her arm to enlarge her vein for dialysis, became infected. Her blood pressure rose and she suffered seizures.

All that is better now that she has a functioning kidney.

“It’s truly a gift of life,” Riley said. “I’ve watched her suffer so much. I watched her sacrifice so much. Now her life is changed.”

Her mother said since the operation her daughter is a new person.

“She just has so many plans now,” Riley said.

Chapman, the kidney transplant coordinator, has also seen a change in her patient.

“She’s definitely energetic and wants to do so many things, and by getting a transplant … she’s opening up a lot,” Chapman said.

Qiana, who took her kidney problems in stride, looks back on her experience with the same attitude.

“Going through it, it’ s annoying,” she said. “But afterward, it’s like, ‘never mind.’”

She is happiest to be done with dialysis. After spending the first few weeks recuperating from her surgery, in recent weeks, Qiana, who lives with her mom in the Windsong Village housing complex across from Aurora Medical Center, has been contemplating her new life.

“Now I’m trying to figure out what to do with my time,” she said.

Qiana has lots of ideas. An animal lover, she is thinking about becoming a veterinarian and is talking about getting a job at a pet store. She also is planning a return to ice skating, and recently received a doctor’s approval. She is also deciding if she wants to go back to public school.