Jason Jester’s quest for redemption – by helping another (+video)

Jason Jester lay himself down on Feb. 9.

Surgeons at the University of Kansas Medical Center cut out one of his kidneys. He insisted.

He donated the kidney to Jane Stout, a 63-year-old grandmother, who lay in the next room.

He’s a 38-year-old man with a wife and two kids. As Jane says, he didn’t have to do this.

Until a few years ago, Jason and Jane were strangers living in Derby. Now she gets choked up just talking about him.

“I have the promise of a decent life,” she says.

She did not ask him to donate a kidney. Before the surgery, she asked him again and again: “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” he said. He’d never been so sure. In his dark and desperate thoughts, he was more in need than she was. It was to save himself as well as her.

Like other alcoholics

Until three years ago, Jason Jester drank six to 12 Pabst Blue Ribbon beers every night.

He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day – Marlboro Reds and Pyramids. Night after night, year after year, he got wasted.

He never drank at work. People like him, he learned later, are called high-functioning drunks.

Jason and his wife, Stacie, work at Mid Continent Controls in Derby. The company makes video and audio components for cabins of business jets. Jason has been the materials manager (the parts guy) for years; Stacie works as a production scheduler.

Stacie worked for Jane Stout, who until August was Mid Continent’s accounting and IT person. In 10 years at Mid Continent, Jane had befriended Jason and Stacie. Everybody liked them.

Jane didn’t notice Jason’s drinking problem. He worked hard, treated people well.

At home, Jason and Stacie were raising Paul Riley, her son, and Kaeden, their son.

Like many other alcoholics with children, Jason wondered what the boys might think of his drinking.

Then he’d drink another Pabst.

One in 100,000

Jane had spent most of her life teaching business classes to high school students in Iola. She loved teaching. She had a family and children.

In 1987, her father was diagnosed with advanced polycystic kidney disease, an affliction in which cysts grow in the kidneys. The cysts slowly consume the kidneys. Physicians put her dad on dialysis.

The treatments extended his life by 12 years. But dialysis is a poor substitute for kidneys; her father’s health began to deteriorate almost immediately.

A transplant would have improved his life, but his relatives either also had inherited the illness or were not a good donor match. Doctors say the chances of finding a good genetic match for a donated kidney from a stranger are about 1 in 100,000.

Doctors told Jane that polycystic disease runs in families.

Tests confirmed Jane also had the disease.

Jane was only 35. It was a matter of time.

As as her kidney cysts grew, she resigned herself to dying relatively young and disintegrating before that, as her father had done.

Tired of being tired

Though he drank prodigiously, Jason Jester says he never hurt anybody, never got arrested.

“I flew under the radar,” he said later. “By the skin of my teeth.”

There were a couple of noninjury accidents in the drinking years. He never got hurt. “I was very lucky.”

But he was a loser in his own eyes.

“I felt terrible about myself,” he said.

He worked while suffering through hangovers. In the afternoons, he staved off the cravings for drink until he walked out the door.

The mistake he made that finally changed his life occurred at Kaeden’s seventh birthday party.

At the party, Jason argued with Stacie, got mad, got drunk and passed out on the trampoline in his backyard.

He felt disgusted that his sons saw him that way.

And he thought: “I am tired of being tired.”

The hardest way to quit, as he learned later, is cold turkey – no rehabilitation treatment, no counseling, no Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

And that’s what Jason resolved to do.

He quit drinking.

A couple of days later, he quit smoking, too.

The cravings tore at him.

Like family

In 2006 in Iola, as her kidney disease progressed, Jane Stout retired from teaching at 54, not wanting sick-day absences to diminish the education of her high school business students.

She moved to Wichita and went to work for her brother, Rick Hemphill, at Mid Continent. She worked accounting and IT.

Rick’s Mid Continent employees became like family to her, she would say later.

Stacie Jester came to love Jane Stout like another mom.

Jane thought she had not long to live. Eventually, as her kidney function deteriorated, she’d have to take up dialysis. And then she’d go downhill like her dad.

And then she’d die, unless she could find a donor. She later looked up what the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network says about donors.

More than 120,000 sick people are waiting for organ donations, the network says.

Twenty-two of those people die every day, still waiting.

Still unworthy

Many recovering drunks and drug users take up some sort of compulsion after they try sobriety.

They throw themselves compulsively into a hobby, or religion, or jogging, or diary-keeping.

The cravings for drink are sometimes so fierce that some recovering drinkers go to AA meetings once, twice or three times a day, trying to stay away from liquor stores.

Jason Jester’s compulsion became his bicycle.

He started getting up at 3:30 or 4 a.m., pedaling furiously from his home in Derby north to Wichita or northeast to Rose Hill. On some mornings, long before work, he’d pedal 30 miles. “It took my mind off drinking,” he said.

He pedaled 3,500 miles last summer, including all the way across Kansas.

He lost 60 pounds. He looked trim, fit and young again, but he still felt unworthy.

One day at work last August, he heard Jane Stout announce that she was leaving Mid Continent after nine years.

Her departure was related to “a health issue,” she told people.

She did not say what it was.

Almost impossible

Doctors had told Jane that her kidney function was now so diminished that she was only weeks away from dialysis.

Once that started, she knew she’d decline rapidly. She was 63.

Jane registered on a transplant patient waiting list, and at the request of Mid Continent employees, which included her two children, she passed along details about how she needed a kidney donor.

Jason immediately asked Jane’s children for more details. He did not mention this to Stacie, his wife.

They told him that the best chance for a genetic match for a donor transplant was Jane’s family, but they’d all been medically ruled out.

They told him the odds of finding a nonrelative with a good genetic match were almost impossible.

For starters, it would need to be someone with Jane’s blood type: O.

That got his attention.

His blood type: O.

He did not hesitate

In the following weeks, Jason Jester worked diligently to learn whether he could help Jane.

He called medical people supervising Jane’s case. He studied information about kidneys and submitted to blood work. He filled out forms and answered questions, some medical, some psychological.

For one test, he needed to supply doctors with 24 consecutive hours’ worth of his urine. So he peed in a cup at work all day, then poured each cup sample into a larger container – and stuck the container in a cooler to keep the combined samples for that day from degrading.

Doctors told him the pain after surgery would be intense.

When he told Stacie what he was doing, she cheered him.

“I love Jane,” she said. “She was my best buddy at work. I don’t want her to spend another day suffering.”

For the first time since he became a drunk, Jason had found a purpose beyond loving his children and his wife.

“Redemption?” he said later. “I’m not sure about that.”

A dangerous risk

When doctors told him he was a good donor match, he told them to prepare for surgery. And then the doctors told him something that finally gave him pause.

They told him the pain after the laparoscopic surgery would be so intense that there was no way he’d be able to stand it without taking oxycodone, the opiate-based narcotic painkiller noted for its addictive properties.

For an alcoholic like Jason, less than three years after his first day of sobriety, taking addictive narcotic painkillers is a dangerous risk. Life-threatening, even.

He told the doctors he would not take the Oxy.

Impossible, they said. He’d have to take it for the pain.

Fine, he said. He’d take it only if the pain was unbearable and then only in the smallest doses possible.

He was 38. He’d gone from looking fat, sick and bloated to looking trim, well-muscled, athletic.

And yet, there was still a part of him that thought he was no good.

Swallowing Oxy

Jason’s offer to donate his kidney floored Jane Stout.

They talked at first in phone texts, then in person. Jane told him many times: “You don’t have to do this.”

“I know,” he said.

At work, he went to Rick Hemphill, Mid Continent’s owner and Jane’s brother. Hemphill did not have the disease that afflicted Jane and that killed his father, but tests had shown he was not a good match for donating his kidney to Jane.

Jason told Hemphill he was giving his kidney to Jane.

Hemphill didn’t say much. “Rick is not a guy who says a lot,” Jason said later. But it was clear he was appreciative.

To friends and family and to Jane, Jason cracked a joke: “I’m the parts guy at work. Somebody needs a part.”

On Feb. 9, he lay down on that hospital bed.

He woke up feeling terrible.

The pain was as bad as the doctors had said it would be.

It hurt so much that doctors gave him intravenous doses of Fentanyl, an opiate more powerful than morphine. Nurses handed him oxycodone. He swallowed the pills.

Hands on shoulders

Jason Jester looks fine now.

So does Jane Stout.

The two of them sit side by side on Jane’s living room couch in Derby. When she starts telling the story and looks across the room at Stacie Jester, she almost chokes up.

“I have the promise of a decent life,” Jane said.

“I have a grandson, 9 months old,” she said. “I can hold him now, and know that I have the energy to hold him.

“I have two children, who are married and here in town. And they mean the world to me. This is not just a gift to me. It’s a gift to them. It’s a gift to my grandkids.”

Jason gave his kidney just in time. Had he not done so, dialysis would have started immediately, and her body would have started to break down.

But was this redemption?

Jason stops smiling, pondering that question.

After the surgery, nurses made Jason get up and walk.

He could barely move.

So he put his hands on the shoulders of his 9-year-old son, Kaeden, who had once seen him passed out on the backyard trampoline.

“We walked up and down, with me hanging on to his shoulders,” Jason said. “I wanted to be a good example to my boys.

“I heard later, Kaeden was telling everybody at school.”

But Jason shakes his head.

“It’s not enough.”

Getting there

Jason goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings now.

AA teaches recovering drinkers to make amends. To apologize. To proclaim what you are.

So for this story, Jason Jester says that he’s a recovering alcoholic.

He says to put that fact in the story. It might encourage other alcoholics to seek help.

He doesn’t think he’s redeemed himself.

“Not yet,” he said. “But I’d been depressed and addicted much of my life. So it’s nice to have done a little to dig out of that hole.”

He’s thinking about getting a college degree in psychology. Maybe become a school counselor someday.

He sits silent again for a few moments.

“I don’t know if it’s redemption; it doesn’t quite feel like that.

“But it’s getting there.”

This story was originally published April 2, 2016 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Jason Jester’s quest for redemption – by helping another (+video)."