http://www.niagara-gazette.com/features/local_story_235110456.html
A GIFT FOR SAVILLA: Niagara Falls Native receives kidney from a near stranger
By Michele DeLuca
To him it was just a kidney. To her, it was a life-saving offer from someone she hardly knew. It was such an outrageous gift that she could hardly even consider it. As she tells it, death already had begun to enter her body last year when she decided to accept a kidney from a man she had never met. Now his kidney is in her body, keeping her alive and saving her from hours of painful dialysis and illness.
Because of a 44-year-old man named Stephen McClelland, Niagara Falls native Savilla Kress can go back to her life in Vancouver, modeling, painting and designing clothes.
As for McClelland, to hear him tell it, it was really nothing.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” he said during a phone interview from Las Vegas where he is singing in a musical review at Bally’s.
The two had been conversing on a networking site for models when he learned that Kress needed a kidney. It seemed a coincidence when they learned they shared the same blood type — type O — making them a perfect match for organ exchange.
At that time Savilla, who now lives in Vancouver and also has been working as a costume designer for a variety of sci-fi television series including “Stargate,” “Dark Angel” and “Stargate Atlantis.”
Although she had been diagnosed with kidney disease when she was 21, she had been living a relatively healthy life until her kidneys began to fail a couple of years ago.
“I kept thinking I can beat this,” she said. “I also thought if it’s my time, it’s my time.”Still, she tried every option, including herbs from a Chinese doctor, but nothing worked and her kidney function dropped to about 15 percent.
“The strange thing about kidney failure is you don’t look sick,” she said. “I even had a modeling job when my kidney function was down to 9 percent. The pictures came out great.”
Her nephrologist was concerned she was in denial about the illness. He told her, “I don’t think you realize this, but you are going to die and it’s going to be in weeks.”
Then, pretty quickly, her body began to respond to the loss of kidney function. At 9 percent function, her skin started turning yellow, her ankles swelled and she began to have a hard time breathing. Her body was filling with toxins that are typically flushed out by the kidneys.
“I felt death enter my body,” she said.
Her boyfriend insisted she begin dialysis, but she hadn’t even told her family how sick she was. She knew her brother and sister would insist on testing to see if they could give her one of their kidneys. She simply didn’t want either of them to make that big of a sacrifice for her.
“In my mind, I thought I would rather die than take one of their kidneys,” she said. But then, Savilla saw her sister, Helen’s, heartbreak after they learned her kidney would not be a match for Savilla.
“She locked herself in the bathroom for 45 minutes and cried,” Savilla recalled. “She was devastated she couldn’t help me.
At the same time her brother Frank, in Maryland, was trying to get tested, but he was denied insurance to pay for the procedure. Then an area church held a fundraiser to pay for the tests, but Frank also was not a match for Savilla.
She began self-dialysis, a painful, involved process that forced her to hook up to machines all night long. She even posted video on YouTube where more than 4,000 viewers have watched the unglamorous and ungainly 10-minute procedure required when flushing one’s body with 17.5 liters of fluid each night.
It was when Savilla changed her profile on the modeling Web site, saying she couldn’t take on any new jobs because of her illness, that McClelland contacted her and offered his kidney.
“Somebody saved my life 20 years ago and I never got to thank them,” McClelland told her. He had been in a car accident and a stranger helped him escape from the wreckage but disappeared afterward. McClelland felt that giving his kidney to Savilla was a way to pay the good deed forward.
McClelland, who appears very low-key about the gift, also held a second memory of being saved. He was swimming in the ocean as a young man and was caught in a riptide. He remembers struggling until he could swim no more and then, just as he gave in to his fate, he remembers a hand pushing him out of the riptide and enabling him to save him own life. He believes that it may have been the help of an angel. But he doesn’t make a big deal out of that incident either.
He simply wanted to offer his kidney because, “if someone was burning in a fire or drowning in a lake, I would try to save them.” To him, Savilla’s case was exactly like that.
Pretty quickly Savilla’s family and friends set up a foundation called Savilla’s Hope, which was set up to raise money so that McClelland would have something to live on during the eight weeks he was off work. Friends responded generously. The operation occurred in January when Savilla and Stephen met face-to-face for the first time.
Even then, the gift he was giving her was almost too much for her to accept.
“I almost backed out but, at the time, I didn’t have any options” Savilla recalled. “He had to convince me. He had to do a lot of convincing.”
“It was so hard to accept a gift like that. I can’t even accept $5 from somebody,” she said recently during a visit with her mother, also named Savilla Kress, at her childhood home near Hyde Park.
With no options, Savilla accepted the gift. The operation in Vancouver went smoothly and was paid for by Savilla’s Canadian health insurance. The event was covered by many media outlets, including a segment on the national news, which was also posted on YouTube. Stephen, with his wife at his side, handled it all pretty easily. Savilla felt better immediately after the operation.
“You have no idea of how sick you are until you feel healthy,” she said. “Everything was working.”
There have been ups and downs since for Savilla. These include migraine headaches and stomach upsets while the anti-rejection drugs were adjusted. But, she’s feeling pretty well these days and has an uncanny taste for chocolate ice cream. “I never liked ice cream before. It’s his favorite thing.”
She is back to modeling again and even did a series of lingerie photos that show her scar. The photographer thought it was natural and beautiful.
And her mother looked back on the events that changed her daughter’s life, and was simply amazed at the kindness so many people showed to her family.
“So many happy things have happened,” as a result of the gift, her mother said. She recalled donations pouring in from neighbors and strangers, helping the family in too many ways to name.
Savilla’s experience seems to prove that many people will help others in any way they can, but stories like hers are becoming more common, according to a spokesperson for the National Kidney Foundation of Western New York.
Anne McCooey, the executive director, said that more people are getting proactive about donating and receiving kidneys and other organs through Internet connections.
A Web site has been created in Western New York so that those in need of a kidney can connect with those who might like to donate. The 3-year-old site is called kidneyconnection.org, McCooey said.
“We’ve already had our fifth successful match from it, which is huge,” she said. “Considering there are over 400 people in Western New York sitting on a waiting list and the average wait time for a donor is four to five years.”
McCooey added that while healthy people live quite well on only one kidney, the process to donate is so stringent that by the time a prospective donor gets through the physicals “you will know you are probably one of the best physical specimens walking around on the face of the Earth.”
McCooey also said people like Stephen McClelland are heroes, but McClelland won’t even consider wearing that title.
“I just have a new sister that I talk to all the time,” he said of Savilla. “That’s all.”