Wichita chef needed a lifesaving kidney. A virtual stranger offered one of hers.
Francie Foster has known for years who chef Josh Rathbun was. When she’d occasionally dine with big groups at restaurants where he’d worked over the years, Rathbun would sometimes stop by to greet the table.
But Foster didn’t really start getting to know the chef personally until she decided to give him one of her kidneys.
Back in February, Rathbun, the 39-year-old owner of Lotte restaurant at 320 S. Market— shared a vulnerable post on his personal Facebook page. For the second time in his life, he wrote, he was in need of a kidney transplant, and the quickest way for him to get one would be for someone to volunteer one of theirs. The post was shared more than 700 times in less than 24 hours, and Rathbun’s plea spread digitally throughout the city.
Foster, 61, saw the post and was moved: Here was a young husband, father of two small children, and business owner in the prime of his life who was struggling with kidney disease and suffering through dialysis. It could happen to anyone, she thought, and Foster pictured her own five children, the oldest of whom was just two years younger than Rathbun.
Not only that, but Foster had become friendly with Rathbun’s father, Randy, and stepmother, Adriene, who’d moved into the house next door to her in Eastborough three years earlier.
She had to do something, Foster decided, so she called the number listed in Rathbun’s post so that she could start the process of finding out if she was a match.
Foster quickly learned that she and Rathbun had the same blood type. Then, she filled out pages of forms and underwent a series of medical tests, first in Wichita and then at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas.
In April, she learned that she was a match. And on Tuesday, doctors will transplant one of Foster’s healthy kidneys into Rathbun’s body, an operation that should restore his health and allow him to resume his normal life.
Foster says she knows the story sounds a bit unusual. But it isn’t to her. She saw someone in need, and she wanted to help.
“I’m sure that some people are like, ‘Really?’” Foster said of her decision. “But I was just kind of like, ‘Why not me?’”
Sick and broken
Rathbun, who grew up in Wichita, was born with kidney disease, he said. It caught up to him just as he was starting his restaurant career at age 27. He was working as a chef in Australia when his feet started to ache, but he blew it off, chalking the pain up to hours working in a kitchen.
In fact, his kidneys were failing, he soon learned, and he needed a transplant. When Rathbun was 29, his cousin, Brett Rathbun, volunteered to donate one of his kidneys, and Rathbun was able to move on with life, managing his disease with medication.
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Having worked at several top restaurants in Denver, Rathbun moved back to Wichita to settle down with his wife, Andrea, and his young family. In 2016, he was hired as the executive chef at the Ambassador Hotel’s Siena Tuscan Steakhouse, where he led the kitchen for five years. The COVID-19 pandemic hit during Rathbun’s stint at Siena, and he caught the virus twice: first in September of 2020 then in December of the following year.
COVID-19 can lead to kidney damage, and Rathbun’s doctors told him that his rounds with the virus had affected his donor kidney. Rathbun always knew he’d need another transplant someday, especially because he’d had his first one at such a young age.
He’d been on dialysis for a year when, in February, he put up the Facebook post looking for a living donor. In the months following, Rathbun said, he started to spiral. He switched from daily automated peritoneal dialysis, which he could do at home while he slept, to hemodialysis, which requires him to sit in a dialysis center three days a week, three and a half hours at a time.
Though his body is tolerating the new dialysis better, Rathbun had to undergo three different surgeries to make the switch, and during that time, he also broke his foot. His mental health began to suffer.
“I was just down in the dumps. I was sick, and I felt like my body was just broken,” he said. “I was absolutely depressed.”
What he didn’t know, though, was that Foster was pretty far along in the process of getting approved to become a living donor.
Foster said she assumed the whole time that lots of people were lining up to help Rathbun, and she also assumed that they were much younger than she was. At the time, she still didn’t even know if she’d be the donor chosen. But she began to picture Rathbun sitting at home with his family, worrying about his future.
So she texted Adriene, Josh’s stepmother, and told her that she was a match, and that she was willing to donate. She gave Adriene permission to share the information with Rathbun.
“When I got the call, it totally changed everything for me,” Rathbun said. “I felt like it was so much easier to wake up every day and start my day. Everything was just so much easier to deal with because I knew there was an end in sight.”
‘Of course we should do this’
Foster comes across as soft-spoken and humble. She lives a quiet, behind-the-scenes life, she says.
She made a career as a human resources director and spent 17 and a half years at the Red Cross. Recently, though, she had to step away to help care for an ailing relative.
Foster, who is married to Norm Foster, the CFO of a local property management company, has five children and stepchildren, ranging in age from 15 to 37. She’s also a grandmother to four — with another on the way.
She was raised in El Dorado, she said, and her family didn’t have money.
“But our parents believed in helping if we could, and honestly, we were helped by people,” she said.
Foster, who fills her free time volunteering for several local organizations and serving on the board of the Kansas Children’s Foundation, started the donor process for someone else a few years ago. But she didn’t have the right blood type, so it didn’t go anywhere.
She plans to eventually return to work part-time. But for now, she said, her schedule is flexible, which she also felt made her a good donor.
Foster said that her family members supported her decision, though her daughter-in-law expressed some reservations.
“She said, ‘I would totally do it for you, but are you sure you should do it for someone you barely know?’” Foster said. “But she’s obviously come around and is totally happy, and especially for him.”
Most important, Foster said, is that her husband, Norm, supported the decision, especially since he’ll be the one caring for her as she recovers from surgery. He was behind her from the start, she said, but then he re-read the article that was published in The Wichita Eagle about Rathbun’s plight, and his feelings were solidified.
“He was totally, totally humbled and thought, ‘Of course we should do this,’” she said. “He’s just a great guy, but sometimes people have to process more, and some less, where I just tend to say, ‘Okay, whatever, I’m going to do it.’”
While preparing for the surgery, Foster has become acquainted with a local woman who was a kidney donor years ago and went on to become a power lifter. Though Foster has no plans of hitting the weight room after surgery, talking to the donor helped reaffirm her belief that her own health would not be overly affected by her donation.
“I really do believe in the science that says one kidney can function just fine,” she said. “I’m really not worried about it impacting my longevity.”
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How to say ‘thank you?’
Rathbun and Foster have slowly been getting to know each other in the weeks since the transplant was approved. In July, he invited Foster and her husband and 15-year-old daughter, Lily, to Lotte, where he treated them to dinner.
When Kansas State and Iowa State recently faced off in a football game played in Ireland, Adriene Rathbun organized a get-together and invited both the Fosters and Josh and his family. Foster said that she and Rathbun chatted amiably, and she got to meet his children, Charlotte, 10, and Noah, 8.
After the surgery on Sept. 2, Foster will likely be in the hospital for two or three days. She’s been told that the first two weeks of recovery will be tough but that she’ll be able to manage with pain medication. Most people are just fine after six weeks, she said.
Rathbun will have to stay in Kansas City for at least three weeks after the surgery and will have to be out of the restaurant for a couple of months, he said. But his customers needn’t worry: When he opened Lotte in the fall of 2023, he knew that a transplant surgery was in his future. He hired a chef de cuisine that he trusted, Zakk Thomas, knowing that he’d eventually have to temporarily leave his business in someone else’s hands.
“I want people to know that things will be not only be consistent here but awesome here,” he said of the restaurant. “I’ve got such faith in my staff that no one will even notice I’m gone.”
Foster said that she feels more certain every day that she’s doing the right thing. She knows that if any one of her children was facing a similar struggle, she’d want someone to help if they could.
She really isn’t looking for a grand gesture of gratitude, she said, though she does appreciate the garden tomatoes that Randy and Adriene Rathbun now frequently share with her.
No one involved in the situation is quite sure what to do or say, but they don’t really need to do or say anything, she said.
Having already been through one kidney transplant, Rathbun says that he knows there’s likely no way to properly thank Foster for her sacrifice.
All he can do is be grateful, he said.
“Relying upon the kindness of strangers is difficult for me in the first place,” he said. “I want to be self-reliant. . . . But as far as I know, she’s ready, willing and able, and I’m just thankful. I just let everything else fall to the wayside and am happy that I have another opportunity at life.”
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