Hollister
– Supervisor Jaime De La Cruz’s six-year wait for a new kidney
is over.
Hollister – Supervisor Jaime De La Cruz’s six-year wait for a new kidney is over.
On Friday, six days after surgeons performed a transplant at the University of California, San Francisco, medical center, De La Cruz was back at his Hollister home, resting and recuperating.
The kidney transplant was the second De La Cruz has received.
De La Cruz first learned that his kidneys were failing in 1987. He received a transplant from his brother Jesus in 1990.
However, his body began rejecting the organ in 2000, and De La Cruz has been on a dialysis machine since 2003.
But the daily, nine-hour process – which is needed to clean his blood and filter out waste – hasn’t stopped De La Cruz from working, because it happens while he’s sleeping.
“I think the most amazing thing about him is that you would never know that,” said Ignacio Velazquez, a friend of De La Cruz. “He had more energy than anyone.”
Supervisor Reb Monaco agreed that De La Cruz’s health problems haven’t interfered with his duties to the county.
“I don’t think it affected him at all,” Monaco said. “He’s really a trooper.”
Velazquez – who was De La Cruz’s campaign manager in 2004 – said the supervisor’s high spirits don’t change the fact that he’s been dealing with very serious health problems. Velazquez recalled having conversations with De La Cruz that were suddenly interrupted when De La Cruz asked to be taken to the emergency room.
“He’s been living on borrowed time,” Velazquez said. “He shouldn’t be alive today.”
But he is alive, and he told the Free Lance he’s feeling fine.
The UC San Francisco medical center contacted De La Cruz on Feb. 2 and told him a kidney from an appropriate donor had finally been located. He went up to San Francisco that night, and he was in the operating room the next day.
The search for a new kidney was complicated by his rare blood type, De La Cruz said, and the wrong kind of kidney would have been attacked by his antibodies.
He said doctors have told him they don’t know how long his new kidney will hold up. But that doesn’t stop him from calling the operation “a miracle.”
“I’d like to take the opportunity to thank my Lord, because without Him I couldn’t have done it,” he said.
De La Cruz was still in the hospital during Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, and he said he’s likely to be out of commission for about a month.
Velazquez said he’s probably been more worried about De La Cruz’s health than De La Cruz himself has been.
“You can’t stop him,” Velazquez said. “He wants to get back to work.”
Anthony Ha covers local government for the Free Lance. Reach him at 831-637-5566 ext. 330 or [email protected].
