50 years! WA woman is model of transplant longevity

It was early 1975. Vicki Haggen was 24, two years out of college, recently married and yearning to start a family in her hometown of Bellingham, Washington.  

But her energy was flagging, as it had for much of her time at Western Washington University.  A visit to a new doctor revealed why: Her kidneys were failing, probably had been for years. Worse, she was told, pregnancy would create too much stress on them. A transplant was her only viable path to motherhood.   

Haggen’s response, essentially, was “When can we start?”  

“I had already decided I was going to go for it. My kidneys were going to fail. I was going to have a transplant and have kids and get on with my life,” she recalled last week. 

Today, Haggen, 74, and still in Bellingham, is among the world’s longest-surviving kidney-transplant patients. A kidney donated by her older sister, Donna Smedley, on April 9, 1975, at University of Washington Hospital (now UW Medical Center) has been the gift of a lifetime.  

“She showed up,” Haggen said of her sister. “If it wasn’t for her, I would not be here. She gave my kids life and my grandkids life.” 

Haggen’s surgeon was Dr. Thomas Marchioro, who in 1968 had founded the Pacific Northwest’s first kidney transplant program, at UW Medicine.  

In 1975, kidney transplant was still an emerging area of care. Successful outcomes were far less assured, with grafts failing far more often than is the case today. Haggen said her doctors described five years’ survival as “really good.” She recovered in the hospital for 10 weeks, a staggering length of stay compared with such transplants today. Perhaps equally impressive, she recovered without the benefit of pain medication, not even aspirin, which her doctor suggested would encourage patients to lie in bed and risk developing pneumonia.  

The day after Haggen's transplant, “some friends were coming (to the hospital) to visit. I remember going to put on some makeup because I had been pasty for so long. And I remember looking in the mirror and realizing that my face had color in it.” 

Haggen went on to have two children and later remarry. Over the years she has battled breast cancer and heart failure caused by chemotherapy. She has a defibrillator implanted in her chest.  

Being an organ recipient has extended her life and enabled her to pursue life’s joys, she said. “My focus has been on staying healthy, protecting the kidney and giving daily gratitude for the gift.”  

Haggen and other family members marked the anniversary this month at Smedley’s home in Southern California. Custom T-shirts announced: “Strong women need just one kidney.”  

The message has broader familial meaning than just the two sisters: In 2013, Haggen’s adult daughter, Terra Huntley, was found to have failing kidneys. Four years later, she received a donor kidney — astonishingly — from Smedley’s stepdaughter, Suzanna Howard. (And by contrast, Huntley’s recovery at UW Medical Center was 10 days.)  

In the subsequent process of discovery, genetic screenings showed that Haggen's daughter and son and two of her grandchildren all have a link to a condition called focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, or FSGS. It is marked by scar tissue that forms on the kidney’s tiny filters, impeding their ability to remove waste products from the blood.  

The findings stunned Haggen, who for decades had thought her kidney failure stemmed from a catheter injury she had suffered as a young child.  

It's unclear whether the family members' genetic dispositions to FSGS started with Haggen, but the likelihood appears high, and family members believe it to be true. 

“It’s terrible to think that I brought this into their lives,” Haggen said. “But at least everyone has this awareness, which I lacked for most of my whole life.”  

A moment later, she quipped, “My current husband, just after we got married, ended up having a liver transplant at UW. “We’re like the Von Trapp family. The Von Transplants.” 

Related: April is National Donate Life Month.

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