Duaine Wenzel, fearless, as a collegiate ski-team member.Picture yourself as a young father with a wife and three-year-old daughter, living in a rented house. You're the sole breadwinner, and though you've been saving for 15 years to be able to buy or build a house, it's slow going in the 1970s inflation spiral. Your wife is a full-time mom and homemaker. She has a college degree in piano performance and instruction, but in a town of 2,000 piano teaching doesn't provide a living.
Your mother, living far across the state, dies suddenly of a heart attack. At the funeral, you find out that she had a genetic kidney disease that spiked her blood pressure and triggered the attack. By the way -- you'd better get checked out. You drive back home with wife and daughter, keeping your panic to yourself. How will you ever get your wife into a house and provide for her after you're gone? How will you get your daughter raised and through school?
The specialist you see says "Yeah, you've got it, but don't worry. You won't live a full life, but it's not a bad death. Not painful or anything like that."
That was what happened to my father in 1971. He had always been more than healthy. Played football in high school, was on the ski team in college. Was in the army in Marshall-plan Germany. Spent a summer climbing up and down the ladder to a fire tower in Washington state, splitting his own firewood each morning. Outworked, outhunted and outfished men who were younger than he was. Was the first in his family to go to college and the first to get a master's degree.
Now he was the first to know he had polycystic kidney disease.
Why his mother wasn't diagnosed we'll never know. But others in her family must have had it. You only get it if one of your parents has it, and children have a 1 of 2 chance of inheriting it. (This is another good reason for me not to gamble.) Thinking back over her forebears, in England or Germany, there's a straight line somewhere of young grandparents dying, parents gradually becoming sick.
My father addressed this problem as he has so many others in his life: with his faith, with hard work, with renewed devotion to my mother and me.
By 1974, he was building our new house. With everything that came together, it could only have been divine intervention: sudden gifts from relatives, bargain-basement prices on the lots, a credit union which recommended a competitor due to its lower interest rates. My father made sure to do his part: he sledgehammered the ledge out of the corner of the basement, helped the mason lay block and helped the lone carpenter he hired put up the framing until midnight each night. And put in a full day's work each day.
In 1975, when we moved in, there was one bathroom with a working sink and toilet -- in the basement -- and the "walls" between the rooms were sheets and fabric remnants. My mother stacked up cardboard boxes for cupboards and made meals in an electric roaster. And I acquired a lasting impression that sawdust and drywall compound were "homey" smells. To this day, I can walk into the renovation project that's driving someone else mad and give a sigh of contentment as though it's a roaring fire and Thanksgiving dinner. It conjures up a secure place where my father was constant, invincible and nothing could go wrong.
Meanwhile, my father struggled -- not to make up for lost time, as he'd worked at any job he could find since he was 11. Instead, he struggled to cram a lifetime of saving and preparation into the dwindling time he feared he had left. Was it 10 years? 12? before he found out there were other alternatives to that "not painful" death? Thanks to that doctor's apparent ignorance of kidney dialysis and transplants, he'd shouldered a lot of pain already.
He finally had to consider early retirement from a job he loved -- DNR wildlife biologist -- as the prospect of dialysis neared. He retired in his late 50s; I think he could have easily worked until 65 or more, had his body been able to keep pace with his mind and work ethic.
He's had a kidney transplant, open-heart surgery, hernia repair, gall-bladder surgery and removal of part of his colon. He understands his treatments, does whatever he can to help his health practitioners and is a model patient at home and at the hospital.
One time he was telling me about one an appointment for a stress test. He was left in the room with the treadmill, in a hospital gown and socks and shoes, as the tech left, saying she'd be "right back." He has so little body fat anymore he doesn't even have enough padding on the bottoms of his feet, so he was cold. He shivered for more than 45 minutes before she returned. "Did you say anything?" I asked.
"Oh, no," he said. "I always think somebody else may be having a worse day than I am."
I just hope the PKD gene isn't the only thing I get from him.
