Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 4, 1993 TAG: 9301040034
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAROLYN CLICK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
BRIGHTENING LIVES AS HE AWAITS RELIEF
THE TRUTH, in black-and-white, is that Michael McClanahan needs a kidney and pancreas transplant to escape life tied to a dialysis machine. But that doesn't keep him from living life in full color.\ If his co-workers could snap a photograph of Michael McClanahan, it would likely be a study in motion.
The 31-year-old salesman at downtown Roanoke's Ewald-Clark photo and video center is all energy, bounding from customer to customer as he assists with purchases and offers advice on photography.
He was the company's top salesman in 1991, earning praise not only for volume of sales but for his enthusiasm and knowledge of his products.
When his bosses talk about him, they employ words like "inspiration" and "fortitude," but it's not just because he brings home the bacon for the locally owned corporation.
McClanahan is different from most young men who are on the way up the corporate sales ladder because he is also caught up in a struggle with diabetes, a disease that has ravaged his kidneys and pancreas and stolen the use of one eye.
It is a struggle that takes him three nights a week to Bio Medical Applications, a Roanoke outpatient dialysis center, for the lengthy procedure that removes impurities from his blood and excess fluid from his body.
His left arm is a testament to that thrice-weekly encounter with a machine - it is a war zone of scar tissue and the marks of a fistula, a natural vein that is surgically tied to an artery to make it easier for the dialysis to work.
The purification of the blood through a dialyzer, which acts as an artificial kidney, is a routine that has become all too familiar. While the machine does its work over a four-hour period, he visits with other dialysis patients, watches "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy" with his father, Jack, and shifts in his chair to avoid the cramps that sometimes accompany the process.
"Occasionally, it gets monotonous," he deadpans.
He is a kidder, a great believer in employing humor to deflect the seriousness of his problems. But he is dead serious about this: he needs both a kidney and pancreas transplant in order to escape the confining life on the machine and the potentially lethal complications of his disease.
He wears a beeper that links him with the University of Virginia Medical Center. He has been wearing it for a year and a half, hoping for the sound that will signal a compatible organ donor has been found. He has been on dialysis for 2 1/2 years.
He is willing to wait for both organs, even though each month that goes by means more dialysis and more pain. When his doctors suggested he proceed with the easier, and more accessible, kidney transplant, he turned them down, figuring that would not solve all his problems.
McClanahan, a Roanoke County native and graduate of Cave Spring High School, is no stranger to needles and the poking and prodding of physicians. At the age of 5, he was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and began taking daily doses of insulin because his pancreas failed to produce the natural insulin necessary to regulate the level of sugar in his blood.
His mother, Sidney, recalls how she had to learn to administer shots to her son, practicing first on an orange, and then teach him how to make it part of his daily routine.
"You can shoot an orange all day, but when you go and stick it in a 5-year-old, it's a whole lot different," she said. "I went out in the hall and cried."
Sidney McClanahan learned a lot about juvenile diabetes in those early years, and then faced another round of medical suspense when Michael's youngest sister, Laura, was diagnosed with diabetes as well.
But the twists and turns of their medical cases took her children on different paths.
"It was almost like they had two separate diseases," she said. Laura McClanahan is now able to keep her diabetes under control with the use of an insulin pump, which injects minute portions of the drug into her system.
For Michael McClanahan, the disease took a turn for the worse three years ago when he developed diabetic retinopathy, a condition that causes changes in the blood vessels of the retina. That eventually led to the loss of the eye.
During treatment at UVa for his eye problem, tests revealed his kidneys were failing, Sidney McClanahan said. Doctors told him he would likely be on dialysis within the year, a prediction that turned out to be true.
Still, despite the persistence of his disease and its many complications, McClanahan is not one to discuss his troubles.
"We can come in with a sore throat or a cramp in our leg, and we complain," said Frank Ewald, president of the Ewald-Clark Corp. "But he's always cheerful, always smiling, making light of his plight."
"There are some days he comes dragging in and he shouldn't be here, but he comes anyway," said Cheryl Oyler, secretary to Frank Ewald and the woman McClanahan has dubbed the "Mother Superior" of the downtown shop.
It is she who has rescued him on occasion from the near-diabetic coma that can occur when a patient inadvertently allows his blood sugar level to drop. She keeps candy and glucose on hand in case he gets so busy with a customer that he fails to eat lunch on time.
His insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Virginia, has agreed, after a tussle, to pay the bulk of the estimated $250,000 cost of the transplant operation. But McClanahan figures he will be shouldering about 30 percent of the financial burden, not to mention paying a part of the costly anti-rejection medicines that accompany a transplant.
His church, Virginia Heights Baptist, has established a fund to help with his medical expenses. Another congregation, the Loudon Avenue Christian Church, recently held a fund-raiser for him, the result of a friendship between a church member and one of McClanahan's sisters.
His two older sisters, Jackie Porter, 33, and Sally Jackson, 32, have volunteered to donate one of their healthy kidneys. But he worries that his diabetic sister may one day be in the same plight.
"Or they may have their own personal diabetes problems," McClanahan said. "Even if they are willing to do it, I can't accept it right now."
The way he figures it, he's used to the dialysis routine, accustomed to waiting for that beep that could signal a new healthy existence.
"No matter how bad it gets, I have relatively good health, I can walk, I can see," McClanahan said. "There's nothing stopping me."
Meanwhile, his family - and that includes the people he works with from 9 to 5 - gives him enough space to live while discreetly keeping a watch on his health.
He is an animal lover, specializing in the raising and training of big cats - not fat tabbies that sit on the hearth, but the roaring kind, cougars and Siberian tigers.
For the past nine or 10 years, he has been a regular visitor at Pet City, photographing the animals Charlie and Flora Harvey raise from cubs. One of his favorite Siberian tigers, Tieka, now lives at the Natural Bridge zoo; a cougar, Cubby, was donated to a Myrtle Beach zoo.
"I've known Mike going out there [in the pens] and being a little depressed and spending the night with a tiger or cougar on his lap," said Charlie Harvey, who eventually gave McClanahan a key to the shop. "It pulls him out of depression.
"These cats never forget him, they just start snorting and recognize him immediately."
If he is a wonder to his friends and co-workers, they also provide him with the impetus to get up each morning.
"The support he has gotten at work has made a tremendous difference," Sidney McClanahan said. "He tells me if he didn't work, he would go berserk."
Yet she longs for the freedom a transplant will give her son. She got a taste of that several years ago when the University of Virginia invited the family over to meet some transplant patients.
"It was the dreariest, rainiest, coldest day in May," she recalled. "And they were the happiest people I have ever seen."
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