Whynot had been waiting for a kidney for six years and could barely believe his ears when the transplant coordinator called to say she thought they had one for him.
“It just blew me right out of the water,” he says from his home on Morton Street in Liverpool.
He and wife Patricia sit side by side on a sofa underneath a window in the living room.
“She (the transplant coordinator) stayed on the phone with me to make sure I was calmed down because I was just so excited,” says Whynot.
The night of Aug. 19, Whynot went into surgery for his kidney transplant at the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax. His surgery began at about 7:30 p.m. and was finished shortly before midnight.
He says it wasn’t long after he came home from the hospital on Aug. 25 that he started to get really bad abdominal pain. After being treated for a urine infection, things didn’t get better.
“The pain kept getting worse,” he says.
Pain is something Whynot has become accustomed to. He was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease (PKD) in 1990.
According to PubMed Health, the disease is passed through families. The website says those who have the disease have “multiple clusters of cysts form on the kidneys.”
When things still weren’t getting better, Whynot went to the clinic where he says he found out his creatinine was way over 200. Creatinine is what is measured for kidney function.
“When I was on dialysis, my creatinine levels were running anywhere from 1,700, and the normal range is anywhere between 55 and 120,” says Whynot.
It’s been a long road, says Whynot about the past few months. He was back in the Victoria General Hospital for five days this month. He came home Oct. 2.
Whynot says doctors aren’t entirely certain why he’s had problems. It could be complications from the surgery.
“She (the transplant coordinator) stayed on the phone with me to make sure I was calmed down because I was just so excited.” - Vincent Whynot
“They said it would take about three months before you came around because of all the changes to your body,” says his wife Patricia.
Whynot describes things as an uphill and a downhill battle.
“I couldn’t get through a day without feeling miserable,” he says.
Since coming home from his latest stay in the hospital, Whynot says his pain has subsided, and he’s beginning to eat again because he doesn’t have the nausea.
Before Whynot’s transplant, dialysis was his life. For about a year, he commuted to Halifax three times a week. He would be on the road at 5 a.m., and by the time he returned home it was mid-afternoon.
Things got much easier when the dialysis unit came to Liverpool and Whynot’s commute was just five minutes.
“It’s a big thing for anybody to go through, I’ll tell you,” he says. “It’s not a pleasant thing. It really isn’t.”
When he finally received the call for the transplant, he thought it was a trick.
“It didn’t sink in right away,” says Patricia.
Whynot describes how he felt before going into surgery with one word: excited. When the doctor asked him how he was doing, Whynot said he wasn’t sure how he was lying on the table.
“I was going to jump off that table, I was that tickled,” he says.
He didn’t feel quite as good when he woke up, but now he says it’s a lifesaver. It’s like winning a lottery.
Whynot and his wife are heavily involved with the Kidney Association. They participate in charity events, such as bake sales and yard sales. The couple plans to participate in the walk on Oct. 16.
