Getting treatment for her kidney disease, pregnant and not yet ready to start dialysis more than 40 years ago, Zion resident Debby Ramsey, now 69, got some advice from her doctor. She did not like what she heard.
“My nephrologist told me to have an abortion because either the baby or I would not survive,” Ramsey said. “I changed doctors, and (Dr. John) Munsell is still my doctor.”
Fast forward to December of 1984. Her son Kevin, then 4, answered the telephone early that morning in their Antioch home. He told his mother the nurse was on the phone.
“The nurse was from Northwestern,” Debby Ramsey said. “She said they had a kidney for me. We took Kevin to my mother’s in Zion, and we went to the hospital.”
Based on her research and an investigation by an Illinois Secretary of State’s Office staff member, Ramsey is likely the longest-surviving kidney transplant recipient in Illinois.
Ramsey held a transplant anniversary celebration and educational session Thursday in Zion, both celebrating the success of her transplant and educating the group of more than 50 people about the importance of registering as a donor with the Secretary of State’s Office.
“Dialysis keeps you alive, but you’re not living,” she said. “Living is doing things like raising your children and being able to go to work every day.”
An individual living counselor at group homes in the Zion area, she was also an owner of the city’s oldest business — the IUP General Feed Store. It celebrated its 100th anniversary earlier this year. It was started by her grandfather, Ross Aiuppy, in 1924.
Working in the store with her brother in 1991, they became the owners in 1998. She sold it to James Richards, another Zion native, in 2019. She said it remains a family business today.
One of the people at the party was Gavin Dillon, the area’s regional coordinator for the Illinois Secretary of State’s Office. Part of his job is going to events and gatherings to let people know how an individual can become a donor when they obtain their driver’s license.
Sitting at a long table in the front of the room at the event, with information and material on organ donation and more, Dillon told people how they can register when they get their driver’s license at age 16, when they renew it or online using the Secretary of State’s Office website.
For Dillon, the job is both professional and personal. Now 32, he had a liver transplant when he was 23. He said his disease was similar to the one that killed former Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton. Payton died in 1999 at 46, the same year the donor program started.
“This is a role I fell into,” Dillon said. “It was not a job I knew existed. It’s been very rewarding to be a teacher and advocate of this program. You never know who you might help. It could be a family member or a friend.”
In a state with 12.5 million people, Dillon said there are 7.5 million individuals 16 or over now on the list. Currently, there are more than 4,000 people in Illinois in need of an organ transplant, and more than 100,000 nationwide.
Once an individual receives a new organ as Ramsey has, she said the most important thing the person can do is religiously take the medicine prescribed to maintain immunity to disease.
“You have the new kidney, but your body knows it doesn’t belong to you,” Ramsey said. “It wants to reject it.”
Along with her business career, Sallie Koss, a longtime neighbor, said Ramsey adopted two foster children while raising her son.
“She’s amazing,” Koss said. “She’s always busy. She’s always up. She took her son to school every day and picked him up.”
Though Kevin Ramsey said he does not remember the phone call from the nurse he answered at age 4, he does remember seeing his mother in the hospital after her surgery, as well as being with her some of the time during dialysis.
“I have a vision of the room. There was a curtain and people were talking,” Kevin Ramsey said. “We played card games and, she gave me a joy of music,” he added, referring to later times of his childhood.
