This column appears courtesy of Cindy Lange-Kubick and the Lincoln Journal Star:
Katie Kennell-Langan is a mom and a twin and a 1997 graduate of Lincoln East High School, where she was a swimmer and a cheerleader.
She used to be a massage therapist.
She used to be a runner.
Now she hangs out with her two dogs and her three daughters and her husband and her LVAD, a 20-pound machine that keeps her damaged heart pumping while she waits for a new one.
Her lips start to turn blue when she talks.
She doesn’t really know Chris Nealy, the man sitting at her kitchen table Wednesday morning. He graduated from East with her big sister Sarah in 1995. Last September, he read something on a Facebook page set up for their upcoming class reunion.
It was a post about Katie. How she’d beaten cancer, but how the chemo weakened her immune system and a virus had settled in her heart. It was a thank-you note from Sarah, humbled by all the help from old classmates. He felt so bad, Chris said Wednesday, a big guy in a blue shirt and tie. It was the first he’d heard of it. And he figured he could do something to help, too.
Katie takes more than 20 kinds of medication, three times a day. It makes her kind of loopy, the 35-year-old says. She’s drinking a big mug of coffee. She’s wearing makeup to have her picture taken, and she’s afraid she’ll cry and it will come off.
She’s wearing a stocking cap over her nearly bald head; her hair never came back like it was before chemo.
She’s wearing blue jeans with bling and a fanny pack with two lithium batteries inside that keep her heart pumping. Once they started beeping when she was at the store, and she got home with two minutes of power left.
She never goes anywhere now without a spare pair of batteries.
Katie shows Chris how her Left Ventricular Assist Device works. The tube that goes into her stomach and leads into the left chamber of her heart, pumping oxygenated blood through her body.
She says the tube is stapled to her sternum. She shows off the scar on her chest, the lump where her pacemaker and defibrillator rest.
“I feel like the bionic woman,” she said, “seriously.”
She’s funny. She’s a fighter. That’s what her twin sister, Kellie Wozny, says. That’s what her big sister Sarah Langan says, too.
That’s what Katie says.
“I’m so glad it happened to me and not my sisters,” Katie said, “because I’m the feisty one.”
Heart failure hasn’t made her depressed, she says. It’s made her mad.
She got mad a year ago. She’d been admitted to the hospital on New Year’s Day, heart swollen to the size of a watermelon, blood barely pumping.
Doctors had discovered her heart problem a few months earlier during a scan for kidney stones. Even though Katie had beaten a rare form of uterine cancer three years earlier, her good health hadn’t returned.
“She never looked good, she never had any energy,” Sarah says. “We figured she must have some underlying form of cancer.”
Instead, a virus had been attacking her heart. When she got to the hospital, it was functioning at 4 percent.
Sarah sat by Katie’s bed and explained there was nothing more doctors could do. Sarah is a nurse anesthetist and Katie’s medical power of attorney.
“We had that conversation,” she said. “Do you want CPR? What kind of measures do you want?”
Katie remembers what she thought: B.S.
“I said, ‘I am not going to die today. I have three girls, I’m going to live.’”
She got out of bed and walked down the hall, her husband on one side and her dad on the other.
She saw her girls walking down the hall to meet her.
A year later, the tears spill down her cheeks in the kitchen.
Katie has been on the transplant list since May. She’s at the top.
Twice, hearts have come. Twice, the match wasn’t close enough, and doctors feared rejection.
When doctors implanted the LVAD machine last January, she received blood transfusions and developed antibodies. The antibodies make a match more difficult.
There is still hope, but it’s a roller coaster.
“I don’t have much longer here because my right ventricle is starting to fail,” Katie said.
Back in September, Chris Nealy went to Harlan Johnson, a East Lincoln Rotary Club member, for help organizing Katie’s fundraiser.
Harlan is at Katie’s house Wednesday, too.
The 81-year-old knows Chris better than either Sarah or Katie know Chris. The two men met at church, and Chris has helped for years with the club’s philanthropic efforts.
Chris lives by the Rotary motto, Harlan says, “Service above Self.”
“Chris is an individual who had cerebral palsy when he was born,” Harlan said. “He’s doing this with a couple of strikes against him.”
Chris works full time as a cashier at Russ’s Market on O Street and part time at Big Lots. He walks to work because his condition doesn’t allow him to drive.
When he leaves Katie’s kitchen, Harlan will drive him to tape a television interview and later to the second of two radio interviews for Saturday’s spaghetti feed and auction.
Katie heard Chris talk about her during that first interview.
“It’s kind of like one of those pay-it-forward things,” she says. “I don’t know how to handle it.”
He is so kind, she says. So big-hearted.
So many people have been big-hearted. Her friends and Kellie’s friends and Sarah’s friends, their parents’ friends, old classmates and fellow swimmers and coaches. Meals and gift cards for gas and groceries and cards and prayers.
“It’s been overwhelming,” Sarah says. “You lose faith in the human spirit, and then people do this.”
Katie and her husband, Terry, have a “yours, mine and ours” family, Katie says.
McKenzie is 6, Shaylynn is 15, Jordanna is 12.
Their photos are everywhere in the sunny living room.
Jordanna is the only one home on this sunny, freezing no-school day.
Her mom breaks into a cheer in the living room, showing the way she can still embarrass her daughter.
Showing she still has spirit.
Katie hugs her blond daughter. She hugs her twin sister.
She hugs Harlan, an old man with a defibrillator like hers.
She hugs Chris.
She tells the stranger from her high school days that she will be there Saturday, if she can.
Her lips are turning blue under her lipstick.
She’s waiting for the phone to ring:
“I need my heart.”
Reach the writer at [email protected]. On Twitter @TheRealCLK.
See the Facebook Group here, A STRONG HEART FOR KATIE.
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God bless you for being so strong and such a fighter. I hope and pray you find a perfect donor soon. You sure deserve it. Good Luck and keep your faith. It’s in God’s hands now.
Keep praying!! He’s with you!!
I’m praying for you, Katie!!! Dick Cheney had the heart pump and ended up getting the transplant, and now he is doing great; it can happen for you, too!