|
|
|
> MSU News
Mom Explains Cherished Gift to Children
December 23, 2002 -- By Evelyn Boswell, MSU Research Office
Gifts don't always come at Christmas, and they're not necessarily under a tree. In Angela St. John's case, one cherished gift came as winter slipped into spring. And it came wrapped in the form of a friend.
Four and a half years ago, Stephanie Girres of Great Falls donated one of her kidneys to St. John of Columbia Falls. The two had met the summer before at a diabetic youth camp near Bozeman. Girres was a counselor and St. John was a nurse about to start a master's degree program at Montana State University-Bozeman. St. John also had Type I Diabetes.
"A few months after I met her, her levels started dropping," Girres recalled recently. "She realized she was going to need a transplant."
Girres accompanied St. John to Minneapolis for moral support. While they were at the hospital for tests, Girres was surprised to learn that donors don't have to be related to the recipient. Undergoing tests herself, she soon found out that her kidney was a match.
"It wasn't really a hard decision," Girres said about what came next.
Girres and St. John returned to Minneapolis in the spring of 1998, this time to become donor and recipient.
"If I hadn't had the transplant when I did, I guess in another month, I would have been on dialysis. I was kind of headed downhill pretty quick. I ended up not being able to work," St. John said.
St. John went on to finish her degree and now works as a family nurse practitioner at the Evergreen Clinic she co-owns in Kalispell. She has also immortalized Girres' gift in an illustrated children's book she wrote for her master's degree project at MSU. "A Gift for Mom" is aimed at children, ages 6 to 8, St. John said. She wrote the book – not yet published – for those who have family members who've had or will have a transplant.
"When I started this project, it was actually very difficult to find information or resources for children in general," said St. John, who had a pancreatic transplant three months after the kidney transplant.
St. John is the mother of two daughters and learned after her operation that they were confused throughout the process.
To overcome that, St. John wrote the book with the help of her daughters. It was illustrated by Jonathan Payne, a boyfriend of one of the girls and now an MSU-Bozeman student.
"Providing a book that addressed the issue of transplantation at the level children could understand, could help parents and other family members talk with their children about organ donation," said Charlene Winters of the MSU College of Nursing, Missoula campus.
She added that St. John wrote the book for children age 6 to 8 because she found that children that age are "developmentally ready and open to learning new things. They are beginning to understand the needs of others and are curious about the world."
St. John said her purpose was not to convince young children to become organ donors, but to explain the process to them and help them educate adults. She realized how children could teach adults when her own children came home from school and shared information with her.
"This book is very significant," Winters said. "Thousands of people die each year waiting for transplant. Increasing awareness about the need for organs and the transplant process is a very important first step in reducing the numbers of persons who die needlessly each year while waiting for an organ."
Evelyn Boswell, (406) 994-5135 or evelynb@montana.edu
|
|
|
Email this article
