Friends & Neighbors: Meet Rachel Farmer

By Rachel Brown

Rachel Farmer was just 32 when she was diagnosed with kidney failure. Three years later, doctors gave her three scenarios: dialysis, a kidney transplant or death.

Thanks to a brother who had offered a kidney that was a near perfect match, the Dalton resident got her new kidney 19 years ago. It’s the longest-surviving kidney in Erlanger Hospital’s records since the hospital began performing kidney transplants 20 years ago, hospital officials say.

Now 54, Farmer describes herself as the picture of health.

“Honestly,” she said, “I don’t look like a sick person. I don’t look like I’ve ever been sick a day in my life.”

Appearances are deceiving.

When Farmer was diagnosed, doctors weren’t sure whether her high blood pressure caused the kidney failure or kidney failure caused her high blood pressure. Either way, for three years, she continued to take maintenance medication, and she continued to lose weight. Regular food would not stay down.

Her 5-foot 4-inch frame shrunk to 94 pounds, and her diet consisted of three Ensure drinks a day. Fatigue, nausea and anemia were part of her existence.

Farmer selected a dialysis machine, but her brother, Clyde Chapman, knew she wouldn’t continue with the treatments. She was too active and independent to be tied to a machine, Farmer recalls Chapman telling her.

“He said, ‘Sis, I told you you’re not going on dialysis,’” Farmer said.

Two weeks later, the two were lying in hospital beds at Erlanger. Their kidneys were almost perfect matches — they aligned in five out of six necessary criteria.

As they lay in bed awaiting surgery, Farmer fiddled with a couple of dollar bill rings he had made for them. He’d linked the rings together, just like he used to do when they were children. Growing up, he made rings from foil gum wrappers rather than dollar bills, she said.

“He’s gone now, and...it is so strange that he gave part of (himself) to save my life,” she said. “I would have died back then, I was so sick ... Now he’s gone.”

Chapman died in 2004 after suffering from cancer, she said. His illness in some ways gave her a chance to return the favor as they moved him from his home in Daytona Beach, Fla., to care for him while he was sick. He was a year younger than Farmer.

The kidney taken from Chapman’s 6-foot-2-inch frame was too big for Farmer’s small body, according to Danyell Boyd, her oldest daughter, but it ended up working out. Farmer was put on anti-rejection medication, but for four years, she continued to struggle. She did not take dialysis treatments, as most transplant patients do, to help filter out waste and toxins until her kidney could reach its full functionality.

During those first four years, Farmer was angry with her family for making the decision to have her undergo a transplant, she said. Now she says she’s so healthy that they only tease her about whether the transplant was the right decision.

Considering most transplanted kidneys live only about half as long as Farmer’s 19-year-old organ, Boyd says her mother’s story is “one of the many miracles that have been performed in her life.”

Farmer has a lot of miracles to tell about.

She attributes the success of her transplant to taking care of her body. Too many kidney transplant patients eat poorly, drink too much alcohol or use tobacco products that eventually ruin the transplanted kidney, she said. Attitude is also a key factor.

“I didn’t want to die because I had a child who was in the seventh grade, and I had a husband and a family,” she said. “I don’t feel sorry for myself. I don’t even think of my kidney a lot of times until this time of the year, and then I get to thinking about my brother.”

Farmer still takes anti-rejection medication and sees a doctor twice a year, but she also works a full-time job, cares for a husband who has cancer and does all her own yard work, Boyd said. Farmer is also proud she’s seen both her daughters graduate and begin families of their own, and she now has four grandchildren.

“You would never know if you saw her,” Boyd said. “You would never know she had a transplant.”