Kidney Donation Is One More Way Family Shares : Medicine: Garden Grove woman, one of 15 siblings, is due to undergo transplant surgery on behalf of an ailing brother.

The 15 siblings in the Reyes family shared childhood summers picking fruit and nights sleeping outdoors. Together they built a house for one brother and renovated a historic home their mother bought. They watched over one another’s childbirths and sickbeds.

Now the two youngest of the family will share a piece of life itself. On Tuesday, Lupe Santos, 34, of Garden Grove will donate a kidney to her brother Anthony Reyes, 33, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

On Sunday, as she prepared for surgery, Santos’ small apartment was overflowing with family members from Orange County, Missouri, Utah and Madera, Calif.

“We have a real joyful family,” Santos said. “We do stick together.”

The kidney transplant is just the latest episode in the Reyes saga.

The children grew up in Gallup, N.M., where their father, a disabled veteran on a military pension, and their mother supported them by buying and selling antiques.

“Whatever we had, we could stretch, and it would multiply,” Santos said.

Summers, the brood ambled around the country in an old Army truck through Utah, Idaho, Colorado and New Mexico, working fields.

“We picked strawberries, cherries, tomatoes, green beans, pears, apples,” said their mother, Annie Rosas-Reyes. “We would have big picnics.”

They spent nights sleeping under the stars, and days on the rivers.

“Sometimes we would work in the fields, or sometimes we’d just take it easy and go fishing,” said Anthony Reyes, who lives in Madera.

Patriarch Paul B. Reyes raised his children on a kind of benign military discipline, Rosas-Reyes said.

“My husband had the habit that wherever we camped, we’d clean the camp,” she said. “Wherever we saw a monument that needed to be cleaned, we cleaned it. That’s how we taught them respect for the country.”

And their parents kept them in line with a form of collective justice.

“The rule was if one person got in trouble, everybody got in trouble, so the whole family would watch out for each other,” Anthony Reyes remembered. “All the kids chipped in and helped. The older kids made sure everybody was clean, and Mom would cook and make sure everybody was fed.”

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Still, Rosas-Reyes sometimes looks back with a sense of wonder and asks herself how she did it.

“I grew up with my kids,” she said. “I was 16 years old when I started having my family. I helped them, and they helped me.”

As they grew, the siblings brought that cooperation to more complex projects.

In 1973 they renovated their mother’s home, a historic building built by the first sheriff of Madera County. Then, 10 years ago, they joined forces to build a house they call the Ranch for their brother Jimmy. The home, on five acres of Madera farmland, became a gathering spot for the family, Santos said. “We had a big old garden in the front yard,” she said, where the family grew chilies and tomatoes, pumpkins and cacti.

“If people pulled over and asked, ‘Are you selling?,’ we’d say, ‘Here, we’ll give you a bag,’ ” Santos said, laughing.

The family grew closer as it grew in size.

“We’ve always been there when they have their babies,” Rosas-Reyes said. “We buy them clothes, whatever they need. Birthdays, we’re all there.”

And with 15 children, 28 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren (plus two on the way this summer), that’s often.

“Every birthday is a family reunion, and that’s once a month,” Santos said.

“Two, three times a month now,” Anthony Reyes corrected.

“Sometimes it’s five times,” Rosas Reyes said.

They’ve drawn together during hardships as well. Two years ago they each spent stints nursing three family members in Madera after a bizarre and near-fatal accident.

“My mother, sister and brother were shopping in a clothes store,” Anthony Reyes said. “Before you know it here comes this big old Cadillac, rams right through the store. It ran my mother down, my sister and my brother.”

Anthony Reyes bore the brunt of caring for them. He also nursed another brother from Fountain Valley, who died of cancer in 1991.

Ironically, the stress of caring for his family, on top of his job restoring antique cars, contributed to Anthony Reyes’ own illness. Working sometimes 20 hours a day, he did not have medical checkups and didn’t know that creeping high blood pressure was ravaging his kidneys, until he was hospitalized with renal failure.

“I couldn’t believe it at first, that it could happen to him,” Rosas-Reyes said. “He’s so young. He looks so strong, full of life.”

One million people in Southern California suffer some form of kidney problem, and 12,000 of those have total kidney failure, said Julie Juliusson, a spokeswoman for the National Kidney Foundation of Southern California. The disease disproportionately afflicts Latinos and African Americans, she said.

For three years, Anthony Reyes controlled the disease with diet and medication. But six months ago, when those methods faltered, he required dialysis, and his family began the tests that would determine if any could donate a kidney.

But more than a year before he even knew he needed a kidney, Santos had dreamed that she would be the one to give it to him.

“Me and Anthony were talking,” she recalled of the dream. “He was telling me he was getting sicker. I said, ‘If you need a kidney . . . I’ll give it to you.’ ”

Shortly afterward, she found herself at a sale at Mervyn’s, madly buying nightgowns to wear during recovery.

“This confirms that I’m going to give my brother a transplant,” she told her mother.

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Some time after that, doctors learned that Reyes would require a donated kidney. And a series of six tests of blood and tissue types showed Santos to be the closest match.

Kidney grafts from live donors have a 90% success rate, compared with 80% from cadaver transplants, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing in Richmond, Va., which tracks statistics on the operation. Although the recipient feels better immediately, the donor faces a long, painful recovery from the large incision and cracked rib that the surgery requires.

But surrounded by family from around the country, as well as from Garden Grove, Westminster, Midway City, Costa Mesa and Madera, Santos is confident.

“I went through the pros and cons and decided, I’m going to do it, Anthony’s going to get well, we’re both going to survive the operation,” she said. “And then my body started to calm down, and I started to get happy about it.”