The story of Cora Hugo

Two parents tell the story about their daughter, her fight against chronic kidney disease CKD) and the challenges she faced with the dialysis machine weekly.

Cora Hugo was born on 25 February 1966 as a healthy baby, and as her loving parents Cora (snr) and Chris held her in their arms, they were unaware that she would be diagnosed with chronic kidney disease 13 years later.

Cora (jnr) died in 1999 after three kidney transplants – one kidney was her father’s.

She tells her story in a letter she left behind for her parents.

She wrote, At the age of 13 I was a healthy teenager with no worries about the future. The end of 1979 during the same year I went on a holiday with my family to Durban. During that time I started to feel tired and had a persistent cough, I also had these itchy things around my ankles that looked like mosquito bites. It was a pleasant holiday and I did not want to spoil it by being ill. The next year I went to Grade 9 and one day I felt so bad that I had to be sent home. My parents took me to our G.P. and there my whole escapade with doctors and hospitals started. The doctor had some trouble diagnosing me and when I mentioned the bumps that looked like mosquito bites, (which had disappeared by now) he said that I might have tick bite fever. When I went back for the third time he drew some blood. The next morning he phoned and said that I would have to come and see him and go to the hospital as there might be something wrong with my kidneys’.

Her father Chris explained that shortly after she was admitted to the hospital, she was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease.

“I immediately volunteered to go for a test to see if one of my kidneys could be donated to her as both of her kidneys had to be removed and I could live a full life with one kidney. My kidney was a positive match and in 1979 I went in for a 7-hour long surgery that was a big success.”

Unfortunately, three years later, Cora had to go in for another surgery because the kidney that her father had donated was failing.

“She got her second kidney transplant and the sad news was that she only had that kidney for another three years until she went for her last transplant in 1985.”

Her mother Cora said the biggest struggle for her daughter was the dialysis machine that she had to go on for five hours every second day.

“This interrupted her school work so much that she had to redo Grade 9, but after that, it did not stand in her way again as she completed her B.Comm degree in Financial Accounting a couple of years later.”

Cora is remembered by her daughter Jeanette, who is currently 22 years old, and her husband Cairn, who also suffers from chronic kidney disease and living a normal life with his fourth transplanted kidney.