Ask Billie Jo Walker about her typical day, and she’ll tell you she wakes up in the morning “and my husband, God love him, he takes me off of my machine and writes down my numbers — temperature, weight, blood pressure — and then he’ll reconnect me in the night time.”
Walker, 47, has stage 5 kidney disease and doctors have told her she’s at the top of the waiting list for an organ transplant.
While she waits for the organs to become available — she needs both a kidney and a pancreas — the Exeter woman spends her nights connected to a dialysis machine and her days trying to give her 12-year-old son, Robert, a sense of normalcy.
“I wake my son up, get him ready for school and walk him over to school. It’s right behind the house.”
When she gets home from the short walk, she said, “My body’s just worn. I try to keep myself going. A lot of times I have low blood sugar. My mind is telling me to go and get something to eat, and my body’s telling me I can’t move.”
“A phone call could come through at any time,” letting her know it’s time to head to Philadelphia for surgery, Walker said. “It’s nerve-wracking and exciting.”
That phone call would offer her a chance to halt the progressive damage that almost 40 years of diabetes — she was diagnosed at age 9 — has done to her kidneys, pancreas and vision.
It would mean a chance to live and to have her most heartfelt wish come true.
“I especially want to see my son grow up and graduate,” Walker said, her voice breaking during a telephone interview. “I can’t do much with him. I try to make myself available, to have some energy and strength, to go watch him play football.”
As she waits for the transplant Walker, who used to work in the file department at Wilkes-Barre General Hospital, is depending on her team of “lifesavers,” which includes her husband Rich, her father Donald Cooper who lives nearby and takes her to medical appointments, and even her chihuahua, Daisy, who provides comfort and companionship.
After the transplant, she’ll have other needs, among them the need for funds to help pay for medical bills, post-transplant care and meals and lodging.
To that end, her sister-in-law Gayle Chilson has set up a gofundme account, where she is trying to raise $10,000. As of Tuesday the fund had collected $1,535.
“Billie Jo is a fighter and a strong person,” Chilson wrote in her appeal. “She has overcome many obstacles in her lifetime, but this is her biggest obstacle. She needs to win.”