Gift ends Wall family’s agony
By KEITH BROWN • COASTAL MONMOUTH BUREAU • May 8, 2010
WALL — Watching 5-year-old Kiley Hubbard tooling around her yard on her battery-powered toy ATV, a tuft of black hair poking out from under her pink helmet, you’d be hard-pressed to know the 36-pound waif has looked death square in the eye and sent him packing. Three times.
And walking through her backyard with her lifelong friend and former speech therapist Donna Kuchinski, Kiley betrays little evidence of a life spent more frequently in hospitals than out, of nearly six years of hours-long dialysis treatments occurring three- sometimes four times a week, and of the myriad pokes and prods and tests and medicines that have gone along with her condition.
Kiley Hubbard was born without kidneys. She is just weeks shy of her sixth birthday, and she has survived predictions. But until late March, Kiley’s life was on hold, postponed until a suitable kidney donor could be found. And just when Kiley’s body began to give out from the strain of all that dialysis, one was.
And today, on Mother’s Day, while flower shops boom and restaurants bloat with families marking a day for Mom, the Hubbard family plans to spend the day at home, quietly appreciative of their time together, Kiley’s mom, Tina Hubbard, said.
“That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” Tina Hubbard said.
It was a long shot, Tina Hubbard said, that anyone would be a perfect kidney match for her daughter. The phalanx of physicians attending to Kiley put a number to it: 1 to 2 percent of anyone who was able to donate would be a match, she said. In other words, almost no one cleared to donate actually could.
Kiley’s a complicated case, in part because of a failed transplant she had in 2005. Mark Hubbard, Kiley’s father, donated his kidney, but there were complications involving then-unknown abnormalities in Kiley’s anatomy that prevented the transplant, despite 16 hours of trying. Tina Hubbard is not a match for her daughter.
Dialysis was the only option. Two and a half hours, three times a week.
“Dialysis is no way of life,” Hubbard said. “It’s a temporary solution — something you do while you wait for a transplant. It’s not meant to be permanent.”