She woke up each morning filled with dread.
After nearly a decade of battling extreme fatigue, memory loss and other effects of a failing liver, Kelly Kinkade had grown accustomed to feeling like she had the flu every day.
The Greenwood resident had forgotten what anything else felt like.
“I didn’t have a life. I was in bed most days. I wasn’t functioning like an adult should. It was not a life,” she said. “Feeling normal, to be able to go to work, things that most people take for granted, has been huge for me.”
“If you would have told me in March 2020 that this where I’d be today, I would not have believed you. I would not have thought it possible.”
The past year has exposed Kinkade to opportunities that she never expected to have again. She received a liver transplant in July 2020, and ever since, has regained the health that had eluded her for so long.
She has returned to work as an attorney in Franklin, is able to go for a jog or attend an after-work function without feeling completely drained, and in December, became engaged to her longtime boyfriend.
“Sometimes I think about what life was like, and it’s such a blessing. I don’t take for granted that I feel well,” she said. “I much more conscious about food and diet and exercise. Because feeling this way is so important after everything I’ve gone through.”
Kinkade, 35, started having problems with her liver in 2011. She felt fatigued and tired easily, feelings that she initially tried to ignore. But the symptoms got worse. In the matter of a few months, she was getting nauseous, couldn’t keep meals down and started losing weight. Soon, her skin and eyes turned a sickly shade of yellow, which forced her to act.
She was diagnosed with auto-immune hepatitis, in which her immune system had decided her liver was a threat to her body and was attacking it as if it were a bacteria or virus. Her doctor informed her her liver was already severely damaged, and started her on autoimmune medications and steroids.
The medication shredded Kinkade’s short-term memory and decision-making skills. She forgot the names of animals and pets that her family owned. She had to scale back — and in some cases step away from — her career as an attorney.
Her body couldn’t get rid of toxins the normal way. It tried to force it out through the pores in her skin, causing insufferable itching. She would sleep during the day and be awake all night long. Fatigue was a permanent part of her life.
To put it into perspective, every day was like waking up with the flu, she said.
Medication had stabilized her condition to the point where it was no longer life-and-death, but at the same time, ensured that her case was less dire than others, pushing her far down the organ donation list for a liver from a deceased donor.
“In her case, she was feeling tired and had liver failure and needed a transplant. But because her score was low, she was not going to get a donor at all,” said Dr. Chandrashekhar A. Kubal, surgical director of the IU Health adult liver transplant program, in 2020.
Her best option was a living transplant, and though 10 relatives and close friends tested to be potential donors, none were a match. Her optimism waned.
That changed in early 2020, while Kinkade started working with IU Health through their newly restored living liver donor program. She was accepted to be the first living transplant recipient at IU Health in 20 years, and found a donor in her cousin, Paul Stringfield.
After a battery of tests, from CT scans to x-rays to blood work, Stringfield had a liver that matched Kinkade’s, and was deemed healthy enough to donate. Though the coronavirus delayed the transplant surgery, the procedure was completed on July 20, 2020.
In recovery, Kinkade was put on steroids and other medications, which caused her pain and made rest difficult. Soon, her body healed and her medications were reduced, which led to another challenge — mentally allowing herself to heal.
“I didn’t want to wait to recover. Actually having to take it easy, not do too much, even if I felt so well for the first time in 10 years,” she said. “I had to learn to take it easy, even if I definitely didn’t want to take it easy.”
The impact of COVID-19, and the risks of being out in public, required Kinkade to continue to be relatively isolated for months after the surgery.
“For at least the last half of 2020, it made me feel like I wasn’t better at all, because I was still living a very isolated life,” she said.
But small steps forward brought encouragement. She and her boyfriend of about three years got engaged in December. Her health continued to stabilize and improve. Her endurance grew stronger, and her surgical wounds healed.
She was ready to return to work.
“I finally felt like I had a job where people could rely on me,” she said.
Applying for attorney openings, she found an opening with the Criminal Defense Team in Franklin, a familiar firm that she had interned with during law school. She applied, and was hired in March.
“I’d always wanted to work for them. But being ill, it seemed too far off,” she said.
In her work as a criminal defense attorney, she has already defended clients in three jury trials. Like most things in her life, she thought the ability to finish a trial was one that had disappeared.
“Getting back into the courtroom, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to do this, which is my passion,” she said. “It was quite amazing to wake up the day after a jury trial and not be overwhelmingly ill, which is what I used to experience.”
It’s not just work. Kinkade has been able to do more activities, some spontaneously — something she wouldn’t have dared to do prior to her transplant. She can pick up her niece and take her swimming. Recently, she decided to go to an Indianapolis Indians baseball game after work with a co-worker.
A full day like that in the past would have been impossible.
“I can do things without worrying, am I going to feel OK? Am I going to be able to do that?” she said. “There are all of these really simple things that I couldn’t do before.”
By sharing her story, Kinkade hopes to share with people how easy it can be to take health for granted. At the same time, she wants to emphasize how her own recovery would never have possible without organ donors.
Maybe her experience will convince some people to sign up to be donors, she said.
“There are so many people just like me … They’ve put their lives on hold, most of them through no real fault of their own. And they’re desperately waiting,” she said.
