Alison Agar continues to recover at Ronald McDonald House in Toronto with her mom, Wendy, three weeks after receiving her third kidney transplant at Sick Children’s Hospital there.
“She’s doing very well,” her father, Doug, a teacher at Fort Frances High School, said Monday. But she must remain in Toronto for another two months before being given the okay to return home.
This is the third such transplant for Agar. The 18-year-old Fort Frances resident, an O.A.C. student at Fort High, had being living without kidneys and on home dialysis since 1995 after her second transplant was rejected within six months.
Agar’s first transplant was in 1990.
Doug Agar remembered the surprise phone call the family received from doctors in Toronto on Jan. 22, telling them of a potential donor organ.
“We got a call at 6 a.m. Saturday morning that they possibly had a kidney [for Alison] and that we should come as quickly as we can,” he recalled.
“So we went by air ambulance at 11 a.m. and were there by 3 p.m.,” he noted. “We didn’t know until the following morning that the kidney was a match–then Alison went into the operating room.”
Three days after the operation, she was up and heading to the bathroom–one of the best signs of a successful transplant.
“It was the first time she’d ‘peed’ in five years,” her dad said.
“She has to drink three litres of water a day and for a while there she could only hold it for about 10 minutes,” he chuckled, noting transplant recipients must continue to drink large volumes of water to keep the kidney wet.
An honour roll student, the teen is still hitting the books while away from school, working on semester courses of English literature and economics.
Her classmates also are lending a hand, with more than $2,400 raised by Fort High students for Agar and her family during a challenge issued by the senior band executive.
The cheque was presented to Doug Agar on Monday morning.
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
