My Kidney Transplant Story: Sandra Merritt

My kidney failure started in 2002, but I wasn’t told until 2011. In 2011 I got pretty sick—I couldn’t even get myself off the coach. I went to the ER and they thought I had meningitis, so they put me in the hospital.  

A doctor came in and said they did my test wrong: I didn’t have meningitis, but I was in kidney failure. I said, “What?” He told me to just call my regular doctor and walked out. I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe. 

It took me a long time to get in to see somebody, so it was pretty stressful. My dad’s side of the family has kidney disease: my uncle had had a kidney transplant and my dad was on dialysis. But once they started examining me, they didn’t think I had the same thing as them. I went to Mayo Clinic Rochester, and they said I didn’t have disease, I had scarring.  

In 2015 or 2016, I went to an allergy guy because my mom and I thought we were allergic to mushrooms. I worked at the Duluth Fire Department, and a guy there had been blending mushrooms into my food from the fall of 2001 till the spring of 2002, even though I had told everyone I was allergic to mushrooms.  

I thought maybe I was having an allergic reaction, but the doctor told me that I wasn’t allergic to mushrooms, I had a genetic condition that makes them a poison, and mushroom poisoning causes renal failure. I had a physical every year since I was a little girl and had perfect kidney function until 2002, when my kidneys were down to 50% function. 

I went back to Mayo and a doctor insisted he was going to prove that my kidney failure was due to disease. They did two biopsies and both confirmed that it was scarring, not disease.  

I went on the transplant list in 2020. I retired from the fire department and got on the list at Mayo, as well as the Mayo Clinics in Florida and Arizona. I was on the news twice and on the radio multiple times. I made T-shirts with the QR code to my microsite and sold 200 of them, posted on social media multiple times, and handed out 2,000 microsite business cards. 

I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I called the University of Minnesota Fairview and asked how soon they could get me in for testing. I also decided to make one more last-ditch effort on social. I took a letter I found online and reworked it to fit my situation and put it on Facebook. All of a sudden, I got 185 shares. On all my other posts, maybe one person would share.  

A lady who was on the fundraising committee with me at my son’s high school shared it, and someone she worked with more than 12 years ago saw it and called her dad. He was already set up to donate a kidney at the U of M, and he wasn’t donating it on anyone’s behalf—God just told him to share his spare.  

Once he heard about my situation, he was able to catch them in time to add me as a voucher holder. I activated my voucher on May 15, 2025, and I matched with three or four people. I have a couple of weird antigens, and I was not getting a lot of matches.  

I didn’t get any low eplet matches—just medium and high eplet mismatches. I still put in for them, but I never got them. One week, I put in for 11 and didn’t get any of them. I was at 8% kidney function and still not on dialysis.  

On August 26, I got a phone call from the nurse and she asked me if I was in town. I said yes, and she said she would call me back. She called me back at 5 p.m. and asked if I could get there that night because I was scheduled for surgery the next morning at 11 a.m. The person who was scheduled to get the kidney got to the hospital and they found out something was wrong and they could not get the transplant. They tried someone local to the donor, and that did not work out either, so I got the kidney!  

On August 27, 2025, after almost five years on the list, I had my transplant. My recovery is going really well. I haven’t had any issues other than a couple days after the surgery my white blood count went up, but they didn’t find anything and it came down. 

I am very thankful to the guy who gave me the voucher. He and I are friends on Facebook, and we are going to meet one day. I know my donor is a 53-year-old woman from Michigan. I got a message that she sent me a letter. I am very grateful to both of them.

About the Author

Sandra Merritt is the proud mother of three handsome sons, as well as two grand puppies and a grand kitty. She loves helping people, fundraising, and teaching. When she was a kid, people would ask what she wanted to be when she grew up. She always said a gym teacher because women were not firefighters back then, and she wanted a physical job. She enjoyed going into fires and loved doing patient care on a medical. After retiring from the Duluth Fire Department, she joined the Local 1091 laborers’ union to return to physical work. In her free time, she loves swimming daily, traveling near and far, and spending time with family. She also loves cars, car shows, and Cruise for Cancer fundraising events.