By Dianna Troyer
The phone call Tony Rojas had been hoping to get for three years finally came on February 1, 2022—along with a forecast of an imminent blizzard.
“At first, I thought the woman who was calling me was playing a cruel joke. Finally, she convinced me. It was about 6 p.m., and we’d just finished supper,” he says of him and his wife, Lucy.
They quickly packed a suitcase, booked a hotel, and drove ahead of a blizzard to get to Intermountain Health’s facilities in Salt Lake City, 260 miles from their home in Moore in central Idaho.
In 2019, when his kidney function had fallen to 7 percent of capacity due to high blood pressure, Rojas, 52, retired from the Idaho Department of Transportation after working 32 years in maintenance. He learned to do home dialysis, a daily five-hour process he started daily at 5 a.m. and started waiting for a donor.
Rojas encourages people to be organ donors, noting the information on their driver’s license. April is designated National Donate Life Month by the nonprofit Donate Life America. The organization encourages people to register as a donor of organs, eyes, or tissue.
Finally, at 4 a.m. on February 2 they arrived at the hospital only to be told the snowstorm had delayed the doctor and also the helicopter pilot flying in the kidney. Rojas put on a patient gown and lay on a bed in a hospital hallway waiting.
“When I finally heard the helicopter coming in, I got chills. It seemed unreal that my transplant would finally happen. A nurse shouted, ‘It’s here, it’s here.’ The staff started running, and I was rushed into the O.R.”
The surgery started at 6 a.m., a time he and Lucy still joke about.
“It was Groundhog Day, so we thought of the movie with Bill Murray when his life keeps restarting at 6 a.m.,” Lucy says. “The song ‘I’ve Got You Babe’ keeps playing. We joke it’s now our song.”
When Rojas woke up, the surgeon told him the six-hour surgery was routine.
“He asked how I was doing. I joked that it felt like he put a groundhog in me instead of a kidney.”
The surgeon didn’t remove Rojas’s kidneys and placed the donated organ on his right side.
“In some cases, the original kidneys are left in unless one is diseased or damaged from traumatic injury,” Rojas says.
After staying in the Salt Lake City area for six weeks for monitoring, Rojas was approved to return home.
“I’m thankful local residents helped me when I got home,” he says. “I live a pretty normal lifestyle other than I have days where the medication affects me wrong or the infection that’s developed in my new kidney is active. Taking my daily medications looks like I’ve emptied a bag of Skittles in my hand with all the colors and shapes.”
Depending on results of weekly blood tests, Rojas has a checkup at the Idaho Kidney Institute in Blackfoot every one to three months.
His donor…
On the first anniversary of his transplant, Rojas said he suddenly thought of his donor at about 2 p.m. on Feb. 1.
“I couldn’t stop crying because I sensed that’s when he died.”
Rojas wrote to the donor’s family, expressing his gratitude and offering sympathy for their loss.
“I asked if they’d like to meet but haven’t heard back. The only thing I was told is that he was middle-aged and died in an accident.”
Lucy says they are both relieved that Tony is no longer restricted to a dialysis schedule. “He can do anything,” she says. “He still plows snow from our neighbors’ driveways. He’s made prize-winning woodwork entries for the fair.”
For a hobby, Rojas tends to his outdoor history museum. He exhibits regional historical structures and equipment on their property. One is a small house that railroad crews used. A small homestead cabin came from a friend’s property on McKim Creek north of Challis. He saved a vintage 6-foot-tall cross his grandfather’s brother made for his church at Indianola along the Salmon River.
“I didn’t want those things to be discarded because they tell the stories of people’s lives,” Rojas says.
He says he’s grateful for the continued narration of his own life.
“I never take life for granted or the sacrifice this man and his family made for me.” ISI
