{"id":33813,"date":"2018-03-29T14:10:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T21:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/life\/reaching-greater-heights\/"},"modified":"2018-03-29T14:10:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T21:10:00","slug":"reaching-greater-heights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/life\/reaching-greater-heights\/","title":{"rendered":"Reaching greater heights"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Cynthia Flash<\/strong>\/For the Kent Reporter<\/em><\/p>\n

Owen Applequist of Kent is a man on a quest.<\/p>\n

He’s out to prove that you can live an active life even with significant health challenges, and that chronic disease doesn’t relegate you to a life on the couch.<\/p>\n

In Applequist’s case, the challenge is chronic kidney failure, which would be fatal in a matter of days without regular dialysis treatment or a kidney transplant.<\/p>\n

His kidneys suddenly failed due to renal reflux at age 16. That was 22 years ago. The cause was uncommon, but not unheard of; most patients develop chronic kidney failure after a history of diabetes or uncontrolled high blood pressure.<\/p>\n

Applequist is sharing his story now, during National Kidney Month, to raise awareness of kidney health and kidney disease, which affects more than 1 in 10 American adults.<\/p>\n

As a teenager, Applequist would self-administer peritoneal dialysis treatments four times a day, every day to remove fluid and waste that his kidneys could no longer process. Then his father donated a kidney to him; that transplant lasted 20 years and failed in 2016. Applequist went to Northwest Kidney Centers for another 14 months of dialysis treatments.<\/p>\n

He received a second donated kidney from his step-brother this past November. And he has battled cancer twice. Applequist sees these incidents as “minor setbacks,” and they haven’t stopped him.<\/p>\n

An avid outdoorsman, he was a ski instructor and is believed to be the only kidney transplant recipient\/cancer survivor to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa’s tallest mountain. He’s also climbed Mount Hood, Mount Adams and peaks in Iceland.<\/p>\n

He recalls leading young adult survivors on outdoor climbing trips.<\/p>\n

“I would push them out of their comfort zone. ‘Hey, you can do stuff,’ I’d say. ‘Being scared is fine. I scare myself on a regular basis, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it,’ ” he said.<\/p>\n

Applequist ski races, races motorcycles, plays golf and regularly works out at the gym. While looking for full-time employment as a data analyst, he tutors high school students in math and physics and serves on the Northwest Kidney Centers board of trustees.<\/p>\n

He has participated in the World Transplant Games for people with organ transplants and is currently creating a team of transplant recipients to ski 200 kilometers across Iceland for eight or nine days next spring. He wants team members to represent all the organs that can be transplanted; he’s already lined up two kidney recipients, a kidney\/pancreas recipient and a heart recipient. He’s on the lookout for lung and liver recipients to round out the team.<\/p>\n

“When I went on dialysis two years ago, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do long adventures anymore. My life was dictated by my ability to get to a dialysis center every other day,” he recalled.<\/p>\n

“I said, ‘When I get a transplant, I’m going to ski across Iceland.’ It was something I was going to do to prove that I’m physically fit again and back to my normal self.”<\/p>\n

Applequist continues to encourage others to push their limits. He wouldn’t ask anything he doesn’t do himself.<\/p>\n

===<\/p>\n

Keep your kidneys healthy <\/strong><\/p>\n

• Follow prescribed treatments to control diabetes and\/or high blood pressure.<\/p>\n

• Lose extra weight with a healthy diet and regular exercise.<\/p>\n

• Don’t overuse over-the-counter pain medicines.<\/p>\n

• Don’t smoke.<\/p>\n

• Eat less salt, and remember that there’s lots of it in processed and packaged food.<\/p>\n

• Ask your doctor to test you for kidney disease if you are at risk – take a quiz to find out at nwkidney.org\/quiz<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kent man overcomes kidney failure, cancer to live life to the fullest as an avid outdoorsman <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":33814,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-33813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33813"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33813"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=33813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}