No price can be put on Fayetteville man's Father's Day dream

Jun. 16—"During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to scrap Mother's Day and Father's Day altogether in favor of a single holiday, Parents' Day. Every year on Mother's Day, pro-Parents' Day groups rallied in New York City's Central Park — a public reminder, said Parents' Day activist and radio performer Robert Spere, "that both parents should be loved and respected together."

"Paradoxically, however, the Great Depression derailed this effort to combine and de-commercialize the holidays. Struggling retailers and advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father's Day a 'second Christmas' for men, promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods, and greeting cards.

"When World War II began, advertisers began to argue that celebrating Father's Day was a way to honor American troops and support the war effort. By the end of the war, Father's Day may not have been a federal holiday, but it was a national institution.

"In 1972, in the middle of a hard-fought presidential re-election campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father's Day a federal holiday at last. Today, economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father's Day gifts." (via History.com) — A necktie won't do it. Neither will golf clubs or even a new car.

What Justin Ferrell would like as a Father's Day gift is priceless. And it's not even for him.

The 31-year-old Fayetteville man and his wife, Audra, have spent nearly the past two years first with questions and confusion, and now with a determined goal: a kidney for their 21-month-old son, Ripley.

Justin says it would be a miracle, but one he'd gladly receive.

When asked what he wanted for Father's Day, Justin, a Logan County native, said, "More than anything, a kidney. Realistically the odds of us getting a call between now and Father's day that a kidney's available are not very great, but at the top of that list is that there's a kidney waiting for us in Columbus.

"I've got more than a lot of people do already," he added. "I've got a family that I love and who loves me.

"Second would be just to spend time with my family to have a peaceful quiet day with my family and, hopefully, that all the other dads out there get to have one."

----Two years ago, the expectant parents had no idea what the future held, Justin said on Thursday.

He explained that the couple had been trying to get pregnant for a while after suffering through one pregnancy loss.

"We had an absolutely incredible OB's office," he said. "I can't say enough about those folks. They helped us get pregnant the second time."

Going to the doctor for a routine visit, the Ferrells were soon to discover that not all was well.

"We went in for a routine visit. It was in the middle of Covid and I couldn't go in there with her. I was out in the parking lot waiting," he said, when he found out the medical personnel were going to do a fetal ultrasound. "I'd only taken the morning off work. There wasn't one scheduled for that visit, so we knew something was up."

Audra called Justin in the parking lot and told him, "I don't have any amniotic fluid," and the doctor told her, "You're going to CAMC (Charleston Area Medical Center) right now and you're not leaving until you deliver."

While Audra, who grew up in Fayetteville, was transferred, Justin made a quick trip home to Fayetteville to gather clothes and other things they'd need for their stay.

"We were at CAMC for 4 1/2 weeks. I worked (remotely) in her hospital room. They had her on a constant IV; they were pumping her with fluids and the amniotic fluid never came."

An aside: During those 4 1/2 weeks, Justin said he spent a lot of time watching others in medical need.

"Audra's room faced the helicopter pad. I watched helicopters come and go all the time and there was this logo that kept showing up on all these helicopters: Nationwide. I thought, 'Well, that's a popular brand of helicopter.'"

Back to the medical dilemma: One day, Justin and Audra, who had already named their son, were told, "You know, it doesn't look like Ripley is clearing fluid. You have to deliver today or his bladder's going to burst."

"She was induced and our doctor was like, 'OK, this is going to go one of two ways. He comes out and responds and you're not going to see him for a few hours, or he comes out and doesn't make a sound and he's going to be surrounded by all kinds of people.'"

When the actual delivery occurred, Justin recalls, "He comes out and doesn't make a sound. Of course, people rush in and we just hear them working. All of a sudden, it was a sound like a squirrel would make; it was like the softest whimper," and they knew their boy was alive.

"I had a really hard time getting Ripley delivered," the doctor told them. "We're going to work with him a while. If you don't hear from me in three hours, you can call and check, but if anything bad happens, we'll call you."

"So they sent us to the recovery room and I was just pacing and pacing. After three hours, I called the NICU (Neonatal Instensive Care Unit) and the nurse told me, 'Mr. Ferrell, your boy is rowdy.' He had torn his tube out three times," Justin said.

The Ferrells were told to rest and come up to the NICU in the morning.

"We went in there and we got to see him, but they told us, 'He needs more than we can do here.'"

Ripley wasn't expressing any fluids, they discovered, because of a posterior urethral valve, an obstructive membrane that developed in Ripley's urethra preventing the outflow of his urine. PUVs occur only in male infants and only once in about 8,000 births, according to wikipedia.com. Basically, Ripley is in end-stage kidney disease.

"For him to have this surgery, you guys have to go to another hospital," they were told, and then "OK, you're going to Columbus. You're going to Nationwide. He's going to beat you there by several hours."

Justin said, "We went home and we're just throwing everything we own into a bag. We got to Columbus and ended up staying from Sept. 15 until about two days before Christmas."

During that time, Ripley was seen by about 30 doctors, including the well-known pediatric urologist Dr. Daryl J. McLeod.

"Dr. McLeod was amazing. We participated in his rounds. We took notes in rounds every day. We filled about two notebooks.

One day, "we were standing around and he turned around and looked dead at my wife and he said, 'You know you didn't do this. This is not your fault. Ninety-nine percent of your water is your baby's urine.' That doctor just made our day. It was like hearing an angel sing," Justin said.

Another day, "he was talking to us and said, 'Well, you know, when Ripley gets his transplant ...' and I was like, 'What?' and he said, 'Oh yeah, Ripley's going to need a kidney transplant.'"

That knowledge led to other discoveries and other duties."Once we were stable enough to come home, it was like, 'You two are going to be trained and you're going to become dialysis technicians,'" Justin said, and then expanded.

"My wife was born to be a mother. We fostered before we had Ripley, but she was basically presented with an incredible job.

"Audra has become Ripley's project manager, Ripley's nurse. Ripley's care, genuinely, doesn't stop. We drive to Columbus at least monthly for appointments, sometimes more if an emergency comes up.

"Ripley gets regular visits, sometimes weekly, from an absolutely amazing group of providers with our local Birth to Three program, but every day, my wife is doing the work of three people as well as being a mother.

"Ripley has multiple forms of insurance that each cover different things, with different fulfillment companies for each. My wife is regularly on the phone for 4-plus hours coordinating all of that. Ripley gets nine hours of dialysis every night. Ripley is on a very strict diet. He gets his weight and blood pressure twice a day. He gets a shot every night. And every piece of material required for all of that, all the way down to the bandages and alcohol swabs, has to be manually inventoried and ordered at the right time to make sure he doesn't run out.

"There is a list a mile long of things we have to do, like using his feeding tube to give him a bottle he won't finish, that are so second nature to us that I almost said 'Oh, it takes no time at all!,' but it's because it would be easier to say how much time during the day is not spent on Ripley's care. It's just an insane amount of information that I can barely understand," Justin said.

"A semi truck pulls up to our house every two weeks and delivers onto our porch and she has to log all that and make sure we always have what we need from alcohol swabs to his growth hormones."

The growth hormones are needed specifically to aid Ripley, who was born premature so therefore smaller than many babies, to grow to such a size that he can receive the kidney transplant.

"There's no age limit (for the transplant)," Justin said. "It's as soon as you're big enough. As soon as Ripley is big enough, he can go on the transplant list."

According to Yale Medicine, while "most pediatric kidney transplant recipients are teenagers, the surgery can be done on children as young as a year old and as small as 22 pounds. Babies who are below those benchmarks may be considered for transplants case by case, or they may receive kidney dialysis until they grow a bit more."

So Justin and Audra are parenting Ripley through that growth process and enjoying their family time. "He's such an incredibly happy baby," Justin said.

Justin wants him to continue to be, so he's been through the entire testing process to determine if he would be a compatible living donor.

"I went all the way through the process. I got all the way to the end. You could not have designed a better kidney for Ripley, but I was disqualified because my blood pressure was too high. It's doesn't have to be good or OK. It has to be perfect and they told me, 'Yours is not good or OK.' Since then we have been hunting for kidneys," he said.

Justin said his childhood dreams have come true, but that a kidney for Ripley would make it perfect.

"When I was little, a lot of my friends had imaginary friends. I had an imaginary wife and kids. As soon as I knew what a dad was, I knew I wanted to be a dad," he said, explaining his mother and father had split up. "We had a good relationship, though. I would see him a couple times a year.

"Over the course of the pandemic, Audra and I were trying to get pregnant and we sort of lost touch for a while.

"When I finally called Dad and we were talking and I was filling him in about Ripley, I found out he was sick," he said, adding that his father passed away before he could meet Ripley.

While on a visit with his father, "I told him people tell us that we are impressive for doing what we're doing, and my Dad kind of scrunched up his nose and he looked at me like that and said, 'Well, what ... else would you do?'

"When the rubber hits the road, you're going to do anything you can for your kid.

"I'd give him both of mine today, but he needs a dad as much as he needs a kidney," Justin said.

Email ckeenan@register-herald.com; follow on Twitter @Fayette_Cheryl