John and Nancy Dukate of Uniontown normally exchange cards and candy on Valentine’s Day. This year, John owes his wife big time.
Last September, Nancy donated a kidney to another patient so that John, who has kidney disease, could get the organ from another donor. Short of breath and frequently tired, he received the transplant Dec. 15 at Allegheny General Hospital. Now he’s walking two miles a day four of five days a week.
“It meant everything to me because she saved my life,” John says. His wife sits next to him and smiles.
Feb. 14 not only marks Valentine’s Day but also National Donor Day.
“Whether you’re donating to a loved one or to someone you don’t know, it’s an amazing generosity,” says Dr. Reem Daloul, medical director of the living donor kidney transplant program at Allegheny Health Network. “These people are willing to put themselves through unnecessary medical procedures. They let themselves get cut without needing to. I don’t know how you can be more generous than that.”
As of Monday, 104,121 people are awaiting an organ transplant in the United States, including 6,705 in Pennsylvania, according to Katelynn Metz, spokeswoman for the Center for Organ Recovery & Education. That nonprofit group facilitates the organ donation process. About 20 people a day die while they await a transplant. The most needed organ is a kidney.
John and Nancy Dukate, both 69, met in 1972 while they were students at the former Duff’s Business Institute in Downtown Pittsburgh. His roommate had encouraged him to ask the first pretty girl off the elevator on a date to Light-up Night. The doors opened. His future wife walked out, and John, addressing her by her first name, asked her to join him at Light Up Night.
Taken aback, she asked him how he knew her name. He told her it was printed on the book she was holding. Unimpressed by his ingenuity, she brushed him off.
But he made small talk with her on other occasions until she accepted his invitation to attend a Christmas party on Mount Washington.
“We just kind of stuck together after that,” Nancy says.
She was attracted by his bright red hair, now gray, his 6-foot-3 frame and quirky sense of humor. “I don’t have much of a filter, so I say things that pop into my head,” he agrees with a laugh during a video interview on Sunday.
John admired Nancy’s intelligence and beauty. “She looks pretty much the same now as she did then as far as I can tell,” he says.
The couple married in 1974 and have a daughter Bethany Burtyk, son-in-law Charlie and granddaughter Addison, 6, and a son Adam and daughter-in-law Kristine.
After coming home from work on Nov. 8, 2004, John felt a pain in his stomach and, over the next few days, was in and out of the hospital. He eventually was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease, a hereditary illness. His late mother, who was on dialysis and received a kidney transplant, had the same diagnosis, as did both of his sisters.
The disease dealt John four kidney cysts — one the size of a football; another, a softball; and two as big as oranges. He used to hunt with a bow or rifle from dawn to dusk but grew more tired and lethargic.
He told Nancy he felt like he had “a big beach ball in his stomach” sloshing water around.
“He would have had a 50 percent chance of death within five years and go on dialysis,” says Dr. Daloul, the head of his medical team.
The couple moved to South Carolina but returned to Pennsylvania to see more of their granddaughter.
Nancy fretted, watching her husband sit virtually confined to his recliner.
“I worried sometimes that I wasn’t doing enough to help him,” she says, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a tissue. “I don’t know if it was guilt. I just felt bad. All I can do is be there.”
She jumped at the chance to donate a kidney.
“Any ordinary person can do this, and we were able to help others. It’s enriched my life so much by doing this,” Nancy says, touching her chest. “You see things clearer, and you find your own true north. For everybody it’s probably a different experience. I think I’m more open, more relaxed, more joyful – not that I wasn’t before,” she adds with a laugh.
Nancy’s kidney went to a man from Pittsburgh in a nearby operating room. Her husband’s kidney came from a 39-year-old man two time zones away. The transplant system does not tell recipients who their donor is unless they want to be contacted.
Donors and recipients are matched based on such factors as blood and tissue type, body size, location of the donor and recipient, how long the patient has been waiting and the severity of the recipient’s illness. Living donors can give a kidney or part of their liver. Their liver will grow back, Metz assures.
Metz encourages donor candidates below 70 to consider donating an organ, tissue or cornea. Anyone with a question about donating or receiving an organ should call 1-800-DONORS7.
Nancy, who admits to having a spiritual side, says her kidney donation was not just a sign of love for her husband but for others, too.
“If I had another kidney to spare, I would do it again,” she says.
This article appears in Feb 8-14, 2023.
