Published: May 29, 2007 09:34 am         

Simple choices

Morgan family ties make recent tough decisions that much easier

ROFF — Sometimes life’s most important decisions are the easiest to make.

Soon after Melissa Morgan — a former All-State basketball player at Latta — learned in February she would need a kidney transplant, her husband, Scott, resigned as Roff girls basketball coach, and her mother, Vicky Gold, put her name at the top of the list of prospective donors. Both said their decisions, though ultimately life-changing, weren’t tough at all.

“I never thought twice about it,” Gold recalled. “When Melissa

was first diagnosed (with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, or FSGS, in 2000), it was supposed to be a real slow-progressing disease, so we thought we would have a little while. In September, they told us it was time to get serious. I thought we still had several years to go, but hers got pretty aggressive.”

“She basically TOLD me she was going to give me a kidney and not to worry about it,” Melissa Morgan said of her mother. “She’s been to every doctor’s appointment with me, and she was there the day the doctor told me I was going to need a transplant.”

Scott Morgan, whose father — longtime Latta girls coach Shelby Morgan — coached Melissa in high school, spent two seasons heading the Roff girls basketball program, and his resignation came after he had led the Lady Tigers to 19 wins (second most among local teams) in 2006-2007 and a berth in the area tournament. He will continue to teach at Roff but said coaching would simply have required too much of his time during a period when he was needed more at home.

“Once her kidneys began failing at the rate where she needed dialysis and then a transplant, it started creeping into my mind,” Morgan said of his decision to quit coaching. “It was a hard decision, but then it wasn’t hard.

“Leaving that group of kids was tough, but on the other side it was one of those things where Melissa and Garrett (the couple’s two-year-old son) come first. When the surgery gets here, she’s going to need me to be available.”

A wait on the transplant list can often last up to two years, but having Gold as a potential donor enabled doctors to schedule Melissa Morgan’s surgery for August, pending the outcome of the last group of tests to determine her mother’s viability as a donor.

“So far, we’re matching pretty good,” Gold said. “I don’t know exactly what everything means, but we kind of knew we would match pretty good.

“We both had O-positive blood, and that’s a universal blood type,” she added. “If I had had another blood type, I couldn’t have done it. I told her from the beginning that I wanted to be tested first, and so far I’ve pretty much passed all my evaluations.”

Melissa Morgan was diagnosed with a high protein count in 1998, near the end of her junior year at Latta, and, despite treatments for another ailment doctors first diagnosed as the cause, she was still “having problems” in 2000, during her freshman year at East Central University. Further tests found FSGS, a degenerative kidney disease that more often than not requires a transplant and has forced Melissa to undergo dialysis (four hours a day three times a week) at the new Ada Dialysis Center.

“When I was a junior in high school was when I started getting sick and started getting tired,” she recalled. “Then the summer before Scott I got married (in 2000), I had a biopsy done, and the doctors found I had FSGS.”

“Once she had Garrett, it got real aggressive,” Gold said. “They started several different treatments, and we were hoping that would send it into remission, but nothing worked. Eventually she just came off everything.”

With no other options available and with Melissa’s body weakened by the effects of her pregnancy, doctors told the Morgans that the transplant would be needed sooner than later.

“Once I had Garrett, my kidneys started to deteriorate,” Melissa recalled. “My nephrologist (Dr. Abdul Kahn) advised me not to have kids, but he knew I wanted them, so he told me to have them as soon as possible. They told me Garrett could be born with birth defects, but Scott and I just prayed about it, and it was the right time.”

Family support has obviously been a key during Melissa’s illness and should be even more important in the weeks, months and even years after her surgery. Vicky Gold said Melissa’s younger brother, 21-year-old Marcus, and sister, Rachael, also volunteered to be tested as kidney donors, but she told them she wanted to be tested first. And, she added, she told them their time to help their sister could come in the future.

“A living donor transplant kidney has an expectancy of 12 years, so as Melissa gets older, she will probably need another kidney,” Gold noted. “They both offered, but I told them as she gets older, she might need them. And Scott and his family have been just wonderful. It’s been a big family thing.”

Gold will have to spend several weeks in the hospital after the transplant, but she said her sacrifice is small enough if her daughter can enjoy something resembling a normal life.

“I want to do whatever I can to make Melissa’s life a little better,” Gold said. “She doesn’t get to enjoy everything with Garrett that she wants to, but she never complains. She’s never come to me and asked ‘Mom, why did this happen to me?’. She’s just got a very strong faith.

“This is just something you do for your kids,” Gold added. “As a parent, you don’t think about it.”

     

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