[L]ongtime Vermont public servant Cornelius “Con” Hogan underwent transplant surgery Wednesday to receive a kidney from a live donor who learned of his plight at a public event one year ago.
A family friend said Hogan and the donor were recovering Wednesday night after the surgery, which was done at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Hogan, a former human services secretary and corrections commissioner, and a current member of the Green Mountain Care Board, has been suffering from kidney disease. The condition has required 20 hours a week of dialysis, which he has done at his Plainfield home with the help of his wife, Jeannette. Hogan is 75.
Last October, at a heavily attended ceremony where an award was given out in Hogan’s name, the emcee, Sister Janice Ryan, stunned the crowd when she announced Hogan needed a new kidney and encouraged those in attendance to get tested to see if they could be a match.
In an interview Tuesday, an hour before he left for the hospital, Hogan said the donor was at the awards ceremony and heard Ryan’s appeal, got tested and learned she qualified to be a donor. Hogan said he was not allowed to identify the donor except by gender, but he also said — with a hearty laugh — that she was someone he knew quite well.
Hogan said the donor told him of her wish to help in a phone call about six months ago. He said it was hard to express his gratitude.
“You can imagine it was a great conversation,” he said. “I mean, to have something like this fall out of the sky like that, it was profound, no question about it.”
Later, Hogan said the two met at his home and had a deep conversation about whether she really wanted to go ahead.
On Tuesday, Hogan said he and his wife celebrated the last dialysis procedure, which he called “a lifesaver” yet also a ball and chain.
He said he feared a slow decline over time if he continued on dialysis.
“I love life. I love what I’m doing, my (horse) farm, my family, and I could not see myself going down that long slope not trying to do anything about it,” he said Tuesday.
Hogan had put himself on the typical transplant lists to get a donation and said he rejected two offers of cadaver donors over the past year because he said he did research and learned a kidney from a live donor gave him a better prognosis. In an interview last year, he said his best chance was to get a donor privately.
Tuesday he expressed some nervousness about the surgery. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m not a kid anymore,” he said. “I want to get it done and get it over with.”
Hogan said doctors told him that best-case he would be in the hospital for five days or so and able to work from home in several weeks. Much of his work with the Green Mountain Care Board, he said, involved research. The board regulates hospital and health care spending in Vermont.
Hogan said he never considered that he was too old to get a transplant, in terms of available resources and also making it through major surgery.
“There’s something to be learned from this kind of a process. Yeah, it may be a little scary, but it’s done all the time now. It’s not common, but it is not uncommon,” he said.
“I have to put myself back in the beginning. What? I have to go find a kidney. It just felt so daunting. Where do I start? What do I do? What’s the process?” he said.
Hogan served as human services secretary from 1991 to 1999. He finished third in the race for governor in 2002 with 10 percent as an independent, losing to Republican Jim Douglas and second-place finisher Doug Racine, a Democrat.
