A Life on the Go : Dialysis Hasn’t Kept Councilwoman From a Hectic Schedule

Whenever she might be tempted to feel alone or a bit sorry for herself, all Lake Forest City Councilwoman Ann Van Haun has to do is look around the room at her fellow dialysis patients.

While Van Haun, 59, has been waiting almost two years for a kidney transplant, some of the other people who cleanse their blood regularly at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian’s dialysis center have been without a replacement kidney for up to two decades.

But then, Van Haun never feels sorry for herself. Never.

Since 1993, Van Haun has cheerfully endured challenges and hardships that have the few people in City Hall who have known about her medical condition shaking their heads in amazement.

“I know strong people who would have totally tossed the towel in and said, ‘the hell with it,’ ” said Mayor Richard T. Dixon, who took the gavel from Van Haun last December. “I can honestly say I don’t ever, ever remember her being slightly depressed or negative about her circumstances. This is one tough woman.”

Although her kidney specialist estimates that only 20% of his patients on dialysis hold full-time jobs, since the onset of the overwhelming tiredness and nausea that signals kidney failure, Van Haun:

* Was handed the time-consuming public relations duties of being mayor of Lake Forest.

* Took on the critical job as lead city negotiator on the onetime El Toro airport reuse agency.

* Continued working full time for a while at UC Irvine, maintained her council duties, and, most important to her, cared for her ailing husband.

And still the fates weren’t finished. Van Haun was heading to a city meeting last fall when she was involved in a near-fatal auto crash that left her in a walker for six months. Two months after the accident, she was back on the council dais.

“That was the straw that almost broke the camel’s back,” said former Lake Forest Councilwoman Marcia Rudolph. “Still, you never saw Ann do the Nancy Kerrigan thing and complain, ‘Oh God, why me?’ ”

Rudolph figures Van Haun’s “British stiff upper lip” heritage keeps her going. Others have no idea what enables this soft-spoken, slightly built grandmother to keep climbing mountains.

For Van Haun, the answer is simple.

While many kidney patients look at their dialysis machine as a jailer, to her it is a savior.

“For me, the very first time I was on the dialysis machine, I started feeling better immediately afterward,” she said. “I felt a weight lifting off of me. This machine is what enables me to live a normal life.”

*

Van Haun’s high blood pressure led to kidney failure, which means she must visit Hoag Hospital twice weekly to have the machine cleanse her blood of toxins while waiting for a new kidney.

Unlike candidates for heart and liver transplants, kidney patients are not racing the clock, watching their life slip away while waiting for a new organ. Some people stay on dialysis for decades, choosing not to undergo a transplant operation.

As it was for Van Haun, a key period for kidney patients is when they are first told that their kidneys are no longer functioning. It is the only time during the whole process that she felt the numbness of depression threaten to overwhelm her.

“I had been feeling so tired because I was literally being poisoned by my own body,” she said. “It took quite an effort to walk. Even my eyelids felt heavy.

“When I was diagnosed, it was the unknowns that I feared,” Van Haun said. “Would I wind up crippled? What would my life be like 15 to 20 years from now?

“At first, I was in total shock and denial. But once I learned that you could live a normal life, I was determined to have it.”

That meant regular dialysis sessions. The first experience with a dialysis machine is usually vivid for kidney patients.

Van Haun remembers stepping into a pastel-colored room at Hoag Hospital dominated by four rather bizarre, futuristic-looking machines, each attached to a human being by two blood-filled IV tubes.

“I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m in a Stephen King movie,” she said.

*

Eighteen months later, it is all routine.

She comes in, gets poked in the arm and either reads or talks with the other patients. On Saturday, the group includes her older brother, John, a Santa Ana resident who has the same kidney affliction.

Van Haun and the others celebrate when one of them finds a donor kidney. And there was grief in the room when a fellow patient died of complications stemming from diabetes, a common cause of kidney dysfunction.

Her kidney specialist, Dr. Jerald Sigala of Newport Beach, said he also finds Van Haun’s work schedule remarkable.

“Many patients have a love-hate kind of thing going on with the dialysis machine,” he said. “They depend on the machine for life, yet it represents freedom taken away. Ann has a superior mental attitude and I think that’s a big part of why she’s able to adjust so well.”

The council member has made some concessions to her condition. She retired as an administrative assistant from UC Irvine, although that move was also made to spend more time with her husband, Art, who suffers from acute diabetes. She also cut back her workload, particularly on dialysis days.

Not that anyone in City Hall has been able to tell that Van Haun is doing less.

Last week “she was with the rest of us (council members) when our meeting lasted until 1 a.m.,” Dixon said. “And she still got up early the next morning for a city-related 9 a.m. meeting. If I didn’t know of her condition, I couldn’t tell she had it.”

Other than the City Council, city staff and friends, Van Haun has kept word of her condition under wraps because “one of my fears is that people might start treating me differently.”

She decided to openly discuss the situation to help the one person out of 20,000 afflicted with kidney failure deal with the gut-wrenching wait for a new organ.

“I’m a survivor,” she said. “Dialysis doesn’t have to change your life, and I’m proof of that.”