Life’S Simple Things Delicious

Pat Coe didn’t expect to exult over lentil soup.

But as the protein-rich beans, savory in their mud-thick broth, slipped from the spoon into her mouth, she thanked God.

“I’m so thankful I have what I have right now,” she says, as she sinks into a recliner in her new Coeur d’Alene home. “This is the only time in so long I’ve felt this good.”

A healthy kidney from her younger brother, Mike Mougey, was Pat’s lifeline back to the real world from the suffocating dimension of disease.

Foods she hadn’t eaten and activities she couldn’t do for years returned to her life.

“I can have beans, potassium. I can’t wait to get back into the schools,” the former educator says.

The simple things in life are particularly delicious to Pat after 11 years of privation. Since 1987, she’s fought lupus, a nasty disease in which the body’s immune system works overtime and attacks healthy tissue.

The disease sucked away her high energy and shoved her life and her family’s into the scary realm of ambulances, beeping medical machines and emergency hospitalizations.

Nothing about it was acceptable, but the Coes had no choice. It wasn’t until the lupus zeroed in on Pat’s kidneys that her situation began to brighten.

“When it takes the kidneys, it’s ravaged your body,” she says. “The lupus is about done.”

In an earlier era, she would have died without kidneys. But now, organ transplants offer a relatively safe new lease on life.

Pat, 44, was a whirlwind of a woman right up to the moment the lupus keelhauled her in late 1987. She directed a busy Coeur d’Alene preschool, and hiked, skied and backpacked with her husband, Jonathan.

“Lupus hit me like a ton of bricks,” she says. “One day life was great, and then I could barely move.”

Halfway through a pregnancy, her knees blew up like balloons. Her fatigue was crushing. A fever set in, then aches.

Her father guessed what ailed her. Doctors had diagnosed her mother with lupus in 1982. Pat’s doctor confirmed her father’s hunch.

“My world just shattered,” she says. “I was hysterical.”

Lupus is more common throughout the world than leukemia, multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy. It hits women primarily, but no one knows why. There’s no cure, but drugs and chemotherapy usually permit patients to live their full life spans.

Doctors warned Pat she’d probably lose her baby. They replaced her organic remedies with steroids and chemical blends. The disease seized control of her life and forced her to react to its whims and fit into the medical world’s routines.

The assault on her independence infuriated her. She fired the doctors she didn’t like. She rebelled against medicine she didn’t trust. But she couldn’t stop her pain and sickness.

After her daughter’s healthy birth in April 1988, Pat began to realize that life isn’t a solo performance.

“I really thought I could do it alone,” she says. “But I had to say, `No, Pat, you’re part of a team that includes your family, all physicians classical and alternative, counselors, friends.”’

Friends cared for baby Tori when Pat’s lupus flared, which happened frequently. It inflamed her muscles and joints, then her organs. She fought pleurisy and pancreatitis.

It hit her central nervous system one Christmas and she had a grand mal seizure. Instead of Santa’s sleigh, an air ambulance landed at the Coe home.

Her family was helpless to do anything but react.

In 1995, Pat’s kidneys failed, and she began dialysis and the restrictive diet that goes with it.

Again, friends drove home the team approach to life. They took turns driving her from her home in Sandpoint to the dialysis center in Coeur d’Alene three times a week.

After six months, the Coes hired a woman to dialyze Pat at home. But the process was expensive; insurance wouldn’t pay her salary. So Jonathan, then director of Sandpoint’s Chamber of Commerce, trained to serve as Pat’s dialysis technician.

“It took a year for me to get the courage to stick needles into my wife,” he says.

“He’s so good at it he could have a second career as a dialysis tech,” Pat says.

The lupus retreated after it took her kidneys. But it had to stay quiet for 18 months before doctors would consider transplanting an organ.

Last July, Pat joined the list of people waiting for organs from a live donor. Healthy people can donate a kidney because they have two and the body operates fine with one.

Pat was one of more than 41,000 patients hoping for a kidney.

Her best bet for a donor was a living relative, but transplant programs prohibit patients from asking anyone. Donors must decide on their own, contact a program, then survive intense scrutiny of their motivation.

Jonathan and both her brothers wanted to donate. Mike, who lives in Atlanta, Ga., was the best fit. He wanted the surgery in March so he could watch college basketball championships while he recuperated.

In January, the Coes moved to Coeur d’Alene where Jonathan began his new job as director of the Chamber of Commerce. Pat’s dialysis sessions intrigued the new friends Tori, 11, brought home.

“They’d ask about it and I’d explain,” Tori says. “I’d say, `If you’re scared we can go to your house.’ They’d say no.”

The transplant surgery went quickly and well. Soon after Mike’s kidney was in her, Pat unleashed a healthy stream of urine that proved the kidney worked and her body accepted it.

“She started looking better right away,” Jonathan says. “It really hit home when the nurse offered her something to drink and she could have anything.”

Mike returned home a little sore in a shirt emblazoned with “Got 2, give 1.” Doctors can’t guarantee Pat’s body will keep the kidney, but say all indications are good.

Life is delightfully normal at the Coe house now. The dialysis equipment is gone. The family eats hearty meals together.

Pat gulps 25 pills a day, including three anti-rejection drugs. Her lupus is still dormant. She knows it may awaken, but doesn’t dwell on it. She’s too busy appreciating the moment.

“I never expected a living donor,” she says, proudly exhibiting a photograph of her smiling younger brother. “I have today. That’s the gift I was given. I am so grateful for that.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: DONATIONS Waiting list More than 62,000 people are awaiting organ transplants in the United States. If you wish to donate your organs after death, transplant programs urge you to tell your family clearly, then designate yourself an organ donor on your driver’s license or on a special donor card. For information on organ donations or to register as a live donor, call LifeCenter Northwest, (509) 489-4036.