Most people have two kidneys.

Brad Pettway has already had four in his 27 years, and he’s waiting for the fifth.

He was born with the first two — the others have been transplants. For the past 20 years, he’s been living on either dialysis or those “borrowed” kidneys.

His problems started when he was 7, a student at Redwood, so it’s something he has learned to live with. It might have changed his life, but it hasn’t held him back in his accomplishments. His positive outlook pretty much conceals that he’s not well.

It began, he said, “as a sort of slow decline type of thing,” which might have been caused from an allergic reaction to some medicine, “and eventually my body outgrew what the kidneys could do, so they shut down.”

At age 7, he went on parenthanel dialysis, which is the insertion of a catheter into the abdomen where a cavity, porous to some degree, is filled with dialysate, and through osmosis and diffusion it drains the old fluid out and puts new fluid in.

The machine was about the size of a refrigerator, and being hooked up to it was quite painful. But when something went awry, putting pressure on his heart, he said his complaints were at first ignored because “no one actually believed a 7‑year‑old” when he said, “it hurts.”

But more help was on the way. On his 8th birthday, he got his first kidney transplant. That didn’t eliminate all his problems, however, for his feet and legs swelled and he was sick a lot because the treatment suppresses the immune system, and he had to take blood pressure medicine. Brad explained that the medication has an adverse effect, “so that while you’re suppressing the immune system to keep the body from attacking the kidney, you’re slowly deteriorating the kidney as well.”

Though Brad missed a good bit of school, he managed to catch up on his assignments and was promoted from grade to grade along with his classmates.

“I did okay for eight years,” he said, then in mid-high school, the transplant began to fail. His legs were swollen two or three times their normal size and he could hardly walk, putting him practically in tears by the end of the day. He rode the bus to school, but as often as they could his parents, David and Cindy Pettway, picked him up in the afternoon.

Being a child, and then a teenager, wasn’t much fun for Brad — and that’s no doubt an understatement. He had played soccer, but he had to quit that because contact sports could damage the transplanted kidney. He had looked forward to playing baseball, but he couldn’t do that, either.

But Brad was a determined teen: “I kept on going,” he said. And being on dialysis while waiting for a second transplant didn’t keep him from graduating on time at Warren Central. He missed almost 2 1/2 years of classes, but teachers came to the Pettway home each week, so he was able to complete his assignments.

Brad enrolled at Hinds and was halfway through his first semester when he got word that a transplant was ready. Later, he picked up the classes he had missed and added some new ones. The next year he transferred to Louis­iana Tech at Ruston where he had a double major, biomedical engineering and chemistry, and graduated on the President’s List with a 3.9 grade point average.

He made it out of school just long enough to get a job, get settled — and then the second kidney failed. That was in 2007 — three years ago — and Brad is waiting for that important call. He’s on the list at Tulane, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

“I’m always on standby,” he said, ready to go within an hour. “They want you ASAP, the sooner the better, assuming the kidney is there —they can come from anywhere.”

That second transplant lasted 6 1/2 years, and he said he managed to wait through Christmas because he didn’t want to ruin everybody’s holiday. He waited around. The medical team couldn’t believe he was walking and driving — his numbers were 20 times higher than they should have been.

To be eligible for a transplant, Brad said, one has to go through both physical and psychological testing and evaluation, because “they want to make sure that you will take your medicine, that you’re not overly depressed, that you won’t just throw this kidney away. It can be very distressing to get a transplant and have it not work, plus it’s tough on the body. Issues sometimes go along with it. It’s major surgery. Basically they want to make sure you’re healthy enough to undergo the transplant.”

After a transplant, Brad said, he’s usually out of the hospital in about a week, but he stays at home for six weeks, avoiding any contact with people from whom he might catch a cold or the flu or some other illness. After his first transplant, he said, he had chicken pox three times in about three months.

Brad’s home on Oak Ridge Road is near his parents. One room is set up with the dialysis machine and other equipment. He’s pretty much an expert at doing things for himself — he’s been at it for 20 years, reading and studying a lot. His father went through the training with him, “and can probably do everything — except sticking me with the needles. I don’t think I’ll let him do that.” Sticking needles in his arm was a new game for Brad — they have to be inserted in his right arm, with his left hand, and he’s right-handed, “which made it a little tricky.”

He’s gained weight, which amazes his doctors, for most kidney patients stay exhausted and lose their appetites. He said he finds “the easiest way to overcome that is to push yourself a little bit more.”

There are times when you get down, he said, when he’s very lonely and feels isolated, and in the back of his mind he sometimes asks, “Do I really want to do this today,” to go back on dialysis.

Brad has his routine. He gets up about 4 or 4:30 and is at the gym, working out, within an hour. By 7 he’s at his job in the environmental lab at WES, is home about 4, fixes supper, and by 5 or 5:30 is on the dialysis machine for three hours where he can read or watch TV, and then it’s time for bed.

That’s five days a week. He has two days off, any two he might choose. That doesn’t leave much spare time, but he uses it for cooking, doing yard work, and he helps his nieces with school assignments. Dating is almost impossible because of his regimen. When he can, he attends worship at nearby Oakland Baptist Church.

“I’ve always been a science person,” he said. “I’ve always been a tinkerer. I like to take things apart, put things together, make things, to see how things work and why they do what they do” — similar to what has been done with his body.

He knows he’ll always be facing the probability of getting transplants, “but you just have to do what you’ve got to do — keep on pushing. Most people never realize I have any problems, unless I’m wearing short sleeves and they see my arms.”

And he sees people every day, walking around with the same problem he has and they dwell on it. He’s convinced that “Your mentality, your faith — everything plays a large role — they all have to come together. You do need some sort of faith, if nothing else, that you’re going to get another transplant or that things will go well.”

For Brad Pettway, the routine is mixing the solution used in dialysis to filter the impurities from his body, then inserting the needles into his arm and waiting for three hours and then shutting off the machine.

“And I’m a new man,” he said.

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.