Arizona’s First Transplant Patient Helped Others, Despite Her Medical Challenges
Posted By Mike Padgett
Arizona Notebook.com
PHOENIX (May 19, 2009) --
 Violet Lopez (third from left) reads from a scrapbook presented to her by transplant staff after her pioneering kidney transplant in 1969, the first in Arizona history. |
“It was horrible, that’s all I remember,” Violet Lopez says today of the pain coursing through her muscles. “It was just awful. It was like an itch, like a really deep tissue itch that I could not satisfy by scratching.”
Violet was nauseous and in a world of hurt. She was restless in the passenger seat, her head down. Shooting anxious glances at her was the driver, Leonor, her older sister.
“She just kept telling me, ‘We’re going to make it, we’re going to make it,’” Violet says.
Violet and Leonor were in the Lopez express, racing west on dirt roads and blacktop between fields of corn and cotton. Gravel fired by the tires was clicking a loud rhythm against the bottom of their car. They were headed from their rural home in north Mesa to Good Samaritan Hospital in central Phoenix. It was 25 miles between home and help.
“I would have to put my head down because I was so nauseous,” Violet says. “Not doubled over but kind of squirming around in the seat. It was like dry heaves.”
A few months earlier, Violet learned from her Arizona doctors that her kidneys were shutting down. The doctors recommended a treatment that never had been performed in Arizona. Organ transplants would be considered rare, even experimental, for many more years.
Violet had a whirlwind of thoughts in the weeks and days leading up to this race to the emergency room. She thought about her older brother, Bill Lopez, ready to donate one of his kidneys to help her. She lacked medical insurance so her father was scrambling to pull together the $20,000 for her operation
She thought about her job, her new apartment, recently paying the rent, and the hours of discussions with her doctors about the risks involved. They talked about traveling to another state for the operation. They decided they could perform the operation at Good Samaritan. But overpowering Violet on this day were fear and pain and nausea. She kept talking to Leonor about the pain.
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