January 6, 2005

Taylor Rhone, left, underwent a kidney transplant on Christmas Eve. He is pictured with, from far right, clockwise, his friend Gordon Jones, his wife, Wynne Rhone, his son, Travis Rhone, and his mother, Mamie Rhone.

Villager receives an early Christmas gift

By Lauren Heaton

Yellow Springs resident Taylor Rhone has known many a Christmas Eve gift, but never like the one he received last month when he got a call from his doctor at 5 in the morning.

“Mr. Rhone, you’re gonna get the kidney,” Rhone recalled his doctor telling him.

Rhone, who is 48, had been waiting for three years for a new kidney that would save him from his daily dialysis routine. His wife, Wynne, his daughter Jerrika and a friend had been tested and none was a match.

Two days before Christmas, Life Connections called in Rhone for blood testing to determine if a pair of kidneys that just arrived were a match. The kidneys were a match not just for Rhone but also for 67-year-old recipient Robert Tucker of Xenia.

Both men were admitted to Miami Valley Hospital’s renal unit on Christmas Eve, and they came through surgery together, each with a new kidney and a new lease on life.

Rhone, who arrived home from the hospital on New Year’s Eve, feels deep gratitude for the opportunity to start over.

The years of waiting for the unlikely chance of finding a match had been a trial, he said. Directly after he was diagnosed with renal failure, Rhone went on peritoneal dialysis, a nine-hour-a-day blood filtering process through the abdomen that he was able to do at home.

Soon after, Rhone left his job with channel 22 in Dayton, went on disability and became more homebound than ever before.

With a sophisticated home dialysis machine, he was able to avoid the tri-weekly visits to the hospital required for traditional hemodialysis. But the heavy equipment and the mountain of supplies needed to create a sterile space at home was also a challenge to maintain, he said.

If not for Wynne, whom he married last May, Rhone said, he never would have survived the ordeal.

“If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have been knock down dead approximately eight and a half months ago,” he said of a time when he had a threatening infection. “I’m not detail oriented.”

Rhone also received invaluable support from countless friends and family members, including his other children, Dacia and Travis Rhone, his mother, Mamie Rhone, and a friend he calls his spiritual advisor, Gordon Jones, and his wife, Tami. With much help packing big bags of supplies and making contingency plans in case of an emergency, he was able to travel quite often to Florida and Chicago to visit friends.

Jones said his friend has a spirit that won’t quit, and his attitude has driven him to stay positive and to make the phenomenal progress he’s made.

Rhone thinks it’s good common sense. “When something like this happens, you start thinking maybe you ought to do the things you want to do now, because there might not be a later,” he said.

He and his family were packed and ready to do just that by taking a trip to the Smoky Mountains for Christmas when they got the call that changed his life. He may have appreciated life then, he said, but he sees his purpose differently now.

“You get life, somebody else loses it. You’d have to be stupid not to see the life/ death analogy that’s like what’s on the news every day,” he said. “I feel very motivated, very happy. I feel like I owe somebody something, and I want to be worthy of the second chance I’ve been given.”

Since the transplant, Rhone has reason to be thankful for the simplest things, such as snow melting and Ohio State beating Oklahoma State in the Alamo Bowl, and he swears colors are brighter now.

He particularly appreciates the donor, a former area resident, who, he said, had the foresight and humanity to register as an organ donor. The donor’s identity will not be released for some time to give the person’s family a chance to grieve, Rhone’s family said.

Rhone is cognizant of his fortune and gratefully accepts the new challenges that lie before him. Though uninsured, for instance, he must find a way to pay $2,000 a month for drugs that prevent the antibodies in his blood from clashing with those from the new kidney. The challenge is part of the life he’s been given, he said, and he has a plan to deal with it that includes finding meaningful work helping others.

Whatever he does, Rhone said, he will live fully and with renewed gratitude and joy.

“It’s brighter,” he said stepping outside for a breath of air. “It’s definitely brighter.”