Kidney Recipient Continues to Battle Medical Challenges

CEDAR RAPIDS - A month ago, when Jackie Wagner's transplanted kidney shut down, she took it in stride. Not only because she'd been through this before - her left kidney was removed at age 6 and she had the transplant at age 36 - but because her parents taught her to buck up, to solve her own problems.

When Jackie, 44, began using a wheelchair at age 2, her mother was in a wheelchair, too. Jackie, born a breech baby, suffered a traumatic spinal cord injury due to the use of forceps. Her mother, Janet Wagner, contracted polio while in high school.

"They would not wait on me," Jackie says about her parents. "I had to do it myself."

As she grew up in Stanwood, Jackie was treated like her older siblings - Coy, now of Wyoming, and Jeannine Peyton of Brandon. Jackie would crawl up on a step stool to reach shelves in the kitchen and refrigerator. She would drag her small body - thump, thump, thump - up the stairs to the bedrooms. One time her father, Derrall Wagner, a truck driver by trade, took her wheelchair apart and told her to put it back together.

"You never know when you're going to be out somewhere and need to fix it," he said.

So, through life - from multiple surgeries on her feet, legs and hips by the time she was 10 to her kidney problems - Jackie has plugged along.

"I just think she's an inspiration to a lot of people," says Dan Reed, 40, her significant other for seven years. "But, just like her family, I don't treat her any different than anybody else."

"All I'm doing is living my life like I've always lived my life," Jackie says.

Her mother, who always said "You can find a way," did the same after spending time in an iron lung with polio. When she lost use of her right side, she learned to be left-handed. She gave birth to three children. She remained active until her death in 1999 at age 51.

Jackie, who has held a variety of customer service phone jobs, hasn't worked full-time since 2005 because she needs Medicare and Title 19 funds for her medical condition.

But, she transports herself around in a specially-equipped 2002 Ford van. She cleans and vacuums the apartment from her electric wheelchair. She trained "Baby Girl," her Jack Russell Terrier, to pick up things she drops. She cared for her grandchildren until this latest kidney failure.

"Before this came about," Dan says, "her activity level was incredible."

To keep up with her, Dan, who has club feet, bought an electric wheelchair. They'll ride together from their C Street SW apartment down to Czech Village, across town to Walmart or even to Ely on the nature trail.

At 44, Jackie might be a candidate for another kidney transplant but she wants no part of it.

"This kidney only made it nine years," she says. "I don't think I could do it again."

Today, she's supposed to begin using a home dialysis machine that will be her kidney as she sleeps. The process will be more convenient and easier on her body than the intense 3 1/2-hour treatments three times a week.

"It'll take a while," Jackie says, "but pretty soon I'll be back to normal."