Clearfield teacher, 2-time kidney transplant recipient grateful for every day
Clearfield High School teacher and two-time kidney transplant recipient Rick Lilly smiles during an interview in his classroom Friday, April 8, 2016.
Clearfield High School teacher Rick Lilly sits above the taped outline of a body Friday, April 8, 2016, in his classroom. The outline is used in classes to trace the various systems of the body.
CLEARFIELD — Rick Lilly sat at a student’s desk in his empty classroom at Clearfield High School, talking about a subject that is near and dear to his heart — and to his kidneys.
OK, technically, they’re other people’s kidneys.
April is National Donate Life Month, designed to raise awareness about organ donation. As a two-time kidney recipient — first, from his father, and then from a cousin — Lilly knows intimately the importance of those willing to donate organs. The depth of his gratitude on this subject is difficult to express, but he gives it a shot.
“I can sum it up this way,” the 37-year-old Lilly said. “Nineteen years. Three kids. One wife. Two college degrees. I would not have experienced any of that without the kind donations of my father and cousin.”
And Lilly said he’s determined to honor their gifts to his dying day.
“Every day I have on earth, I attribute to them,” he said of his donors. “And I live my life as such, as if I was living for them.”
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On Thursday, April 14, Lilly — who teaches biology, anatomy and physiology at Clearfield High — will receive a Standard-Examiner Apple for Teacher Award. He’s one of 10 recipients of this year’s honors, chosen from 11,000 entries nominating 1,500 teachers. It’s just his first year teaching at the high-school level.
Lilly’s positive energy belies the many obstacles he’s overcome in his life.
“I had my first surgery when I was 2 years old,” Lilly said. Over the next 35 years, he endured 33 more surgeries — nearly one a year.
“The 10th one was free on my (punch) card, so it’s all good,” he joked.
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Lilly has suffered two strokes and he currently has a shunt installed in his head to relieve pressure on the brain. He no longer has a gall bladder — or an appendix — and a section of his small intestine is gone.
Lilly’s latest health problem pales by comparison. He held up his left hand; it’s sheathed in a plaster cast.
“I broke it playing basketball,” he said, somewhat sheepishly. “I tell my kids ‘Don’t play church ball, it’s dangerous for your health.’ And then I went and broke my thumb playing church ball.”
Lilly grew up in Texas, just outside Dallas. His parents moved to Layton when he was 12. A graduate of Layton High School, Lilly earned an undergraduate degree in microbiology from Weber State University, where he has now almost completed a master’s degree in education.
Bowling has been a big part of Lilly’s life. He attended WSU on a four-year bowling scholarship and he’s currently an adjunct bowling professor there. He also runs an adaptive bowling program in its fourth year in the Ogden and Weber school districts. The program allows disabled high school students to compete against one another.
Since 2009, Lilly has been competing for Team USA at the World Transplant Games. In 2015, the every-other-year competition took place in Argentina. In 2017, the games will be held in Spain. Over the last few games — played in places like Sweden and Australia — Lilly has won a number of gold and silver medals in both bowling and petanque, a game similar to lawn bowling.
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Rick Lilly poses at the 2015 World Transplant Games in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Lilly, a two-time kidney transplant recipient, has been competing since 2009 in the international competition.
This June, Lilly is off to Cleveland, Ohio, for the U.S. Transplant Games.
For Lilly, qualifying for these transplant competitions started years ago with hydronephrosis, a congenital condition in which urine from the bladder backs up into the kidneys, causing them to swell. Doctors removed his kidneys when he was 18.
“They were huge beds of infection,” he explains. “I was on dialysis for four months.”
Ultimately, Lilly’s father donated one of his kidneys.
“My mom was going to give me one, but she found out she only has one kidney,” he said. “So my dad gave me a kidney.”
Lilly recalls the transplant with fondness — mostly for the time he and his father got to spend together in the hospital.
“It was great,” he said. “My dad and I got to stay in the same room and we were racing around the halls with our gowns hanging open. I remember my dad saying, ‘If it had been your heart, I’d have given that to you.'”
Bennie Lilly, Rick’s father, said people tell him they admire him for donating a kidney to his son. But he can’t help but wonder who wouldn’t want to help their child.
“It’s one of the most selfless and gratifying things we can do for someone else,” the elder Lilly said. “And as a donor, I can tell you there’s been absolutely no negative impact on me. I’ve been able to do all that I wanted to do, and I have the added satisfaction that I helped give someone else life. … Why wouldn’t you want to be a part of such a special group of people?”
Then, two years ago, Lilly said his father’s donated kidney “gave up the ghost” — a victim of toxicity from the drugs doctors had him taking. He spent two years on the transplant list before a cousin, Amy Peterson, of Bountiful, stepped forward and donated a new kidney.
“It was kind of a no-brainer,” Peterson said of her decision to donate. “We’re a pretty close family and Rick had become more like a brother to me.”
There was no shortage of people willing to donate. Indeed, when Peterson made the call to be placed on the organ donation list for Lilly, she and several other family members were in a vehicle driving to a BYU football game.
“First, one person would give the woman their name and information, then they’d say, ‘Hang on, somebody else wants to be on the list,’ and they’d hand the phone to the next person in the car,” Peterson said. “This happened a couple of times, and by the time they passed the phone to me, the lady on the other end was like, ‘Wow! Can I be in your family?’ “
Although she ended up being the fourth or fifth family member tested, Peterson turned out to be the best match. It was fortunate she’d just spent the two years before that getting healthy and dropping 75 pounds.
“I was able to get healthier in that time,” she said. “I didn’t know it at the time, but if I hadn’t gotten healthier and lost that weight, I might not have been able to donate to Rick.”
Although the kidney from his father stopped working long ago, it’s still inside him.
“I still have dad’s kidney on the right, my cousin’s kidney on the left,” Lilly said. “We call the new one lefty. I’ll call up my cousin and say, ‘Lefty’s doing great today!'”
Lilly lives in Layton with his wife, Emily Lynn, and their three children ages 5 to 11.
“They told me I’d never have kids because of the transplant medications,” he said. “I showed them.”
Because organ donation is an opt-in program, Lilly encourages everyone to actively make that decision to give life.
“Disease ridden as I am, I can still help 20 people with organ donations,” Lilly said. “Sometimes people will say organ donation is the last gift of a dying person, but it’s not the last gift of a dying person. It’s the last gift of a living person.”
Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272, or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Like him on Facebook at facebook.com/SEMarkSaal.