Rockmart’s Jason Walker seeks community help in finding a donor kidney
Jason Walker by all standards is an normal guy who wants to live an normal, healthy life.
The 42-year-old mechanic for Paulding County is a husband to Lise and a stepfather to Hailee. The family lives not far from downtown Rockmart off of Atlanta Highway in a house that requires one to go off the paved road – but not too far. A scenic spot for anyone to want come home to every night when putting in a 40-hour week.
All of his life, he’s hoped not to suffer the same fate of his mom’s side of the family. He watched many suffer from the impact of a disease he prayed would skip over his generation. Yet that wasn’t to be, and now he finds himself in a dire situation for the second time in his life.
Walker suffers from Alport’s Syndrome, which is genetic and causes a number of problems ranging from circulation issues to damage to eyesight and hearing, but more of an issue in Walker’s case is that he also suffers from kidney damage.
“I started getting sick, I was real shaky and losing appetite. The color was changing in my face,” he said.
Back in January, his wife Lisa made him go to the doctor. After many tests and a week at Floyd Medical Center, Walker got the bad news: his kidney was failing, and he’d need a new one for a second time in his life.
“They came in and told me I had kidney failure. It surprised the crap out of me,” he said.
He’s been in this position before. When he was 27 in 2008, Walker got a new kidney donated to him and had been living without many issues in his life since. He wears hearing aids and glasses, but otherwise had a normal life.
He’s on daily dialysis treatments from home, with an area setup in a back bedroom for him to run the medical equipment to provide him treatment without having to go to clinics far afield.
“I’ve been doing dialysis since February,” he said. “I just recently got on the kidney list at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, so now we’re just waiting and hoping.”
WATCH: Full interview with Jason and Lisa Walker (Polk Today Monthly+)
The situation can’t go on forever, at some point he’ll need to get a kidney to get back to life as normal. The kidney wouldn’t be as much of an issue for Walker except for one additional fact of life that he can’t change: his blood type.
Some facts about blood type that is worth keeping in mind: there are A, B, AB, and O. They come in each flavor of positive and negative, forming the 8 total blood types that are found in humans. A universal donor is type O-, which occurs in 7% of the population worldwide, and is the most rare of all. Type O+ blood is also as much in high demand because it can also be given other positive blood types (A+, B+, AB+ and O+) when donating to another person during an emergency.
It is important to understand that if you give someone the wrong type of blood, your body begins to attack the red blood cells being donated. So when you give someone, say, a kidney or other body part coming from a donor, they need to also be the same blood type as you (or a universal donor) to have a CHANCE of it not being rejected.
Hence the difficulty for Jason: A percentage of the population has his blood type, but then you factor in the other problems, like willingness to donate, place on the transplant list, problems you might encounter with your health or lifestyle that prevents your from receiving a organ, problems with the donor, etc. The odds of getting a organ the first time are high against you, a second time comes with even tougher chances.
The Walkers aren’t sitting around waiting for fate to intervene. Lisa and her friends have been out to local businesses in Rockmart and reaching out to the community via an appearance on WZOT to spread the word about Jason’s need.
She’s spearheaded the campaign wide and far, and the search for a donor isn’t limited to just Polk County.
“There’s not a business that you can walk into in town that doesn’t have a flyer up,” she said. “We’re grateful for all the love that Rockmart has shown us, and it has branched out to Paulding County, Cobb County, Floyd County. We have flyers in Mississippi and Tennessee that family have put out as well.”
Both understand that they have to find a match for Jason as soon as possible. Folks are already coming forward as potential donors, and for that they are extremely grateful.
“They don’t tell us names or anything like that,” he said. “They just said whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. We have so many people calling right now, it’s ridiculous.”
Those who want to find out if they are a match for Jason to donate a kidney and can share their spare can visit piedmontlivingdonor.org. They’ll send along a kit for testing – which will have be done at a lab or doctor’s office – and Walker’s insurance will cover everything.
Even if he gets a new kidney, the journey will not be over for Jason anytime soon. He’ll still have to go through yearly testing to make sure his kidneys are functioning normally, and there will be years of medications for him to take as well to ensure a new kidney will not be rejected by his body.
It won’t be easy, but it will at least be a step he can take back onward on the road to normalcy again.
