Bridget Viohl, vice president at Zigman Joseph Stephenson Inc., a public relations, marketing and public affairs firm in Milwaukee, is younger than many of her peers, but she’s been through hospital stays, surgeries and heart-wrenching medical dramas that eclipse those of most people twice her age. At 35, she has endured three strokes, a heart attack, two types of dialysis for kidney failure and a kidney transplant. And during that time, she gave birth to a child and started a new job.
In 1997, Viohl was newly married, a new mom and had just moved to Milwaukee to live with Ingmar, her husband. Following months of fatigue, repeated illnesses, countless worries and several visits to physicians who misdiagnosed her, she was diagnosed with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a disease that eventually causes kidney failure.
“It never occurred to me that it was anything serious,” she said. “I thought that the worse case scenario would be I would have to take a pill every day for the rest of my life. I ate a good diet. I exercised and was in good shape. And I was young.”
Viohl eventually learned that she had contracted the illness because of a serious strep infection she had when she was a teenager.
For long-term survival, Viohl would eventually need to begin dialysis and hope for a kidney transplant. To delay or prevent those treatments, she began an almost two-year aggressive drug program designed to slow the disease’s progression.
Her treatments included daily doses of prednisone, a steroid. She experienced common side effects of the long-term use of prednisone, including weight gain, mood swings, low energy levels and insomnia.
By early 2001, she needed a change and went to see her nephrologist.
“One day I went into (Dr. Stephen Seivers’) office and told him I couldn’t do it any more,” she said. “I spent my whole life blowing up, exhausted and sick.”
Surprise pregnancy
Viohl learned she was pregnant two weeks later, something her doctors told her was highly unlikely because of the drug therapy and her disease. Because of her determination to have the child, doctors stopped all drug treatments.
However, complications caused the baby to be delivered after only a 29-week term. Viohl’s daughter, Ava, weighed just 1 pound, 11 ounces.
After birth, the baby was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit. Because she was so small, Ava had to live in an incubator, and it would be 13 days until Viohl could hold her baby, even for a few minutes. Ava spent 69 days in the hospital before her parents could take her home.
Viohl began to rely more upon her neighbors, who helped care for her son, Kerrick, who was 8 years old at the time.
“At that point, I definitely started liking Wisconsin,” said Viohl, who grew up in California and had lived in Denver. “There was this outpouring of caring, people insisting on helping. If anything could be wonderful about that time, that would be it. I couldn’t believe how sweet people were.”
More complications
When she returned home, Viohl did not immediately resume her aggressive prescription program for her kidney condition.
In 2003, she began working as a lobbyist at Zigman Joseph Stephenson.
However, by that October, a persistent headache that Viohl had dealt with for several days turned into something far more serious.
“I was at work, looking at my computer, and I could hear people talking to me, but couldn’t decipher what they were saying,” she recalled.
Viohl drove herself home and later to the emergency room at St. Mary’s Hospital.
Although she wouldn’t know it at the time, Viohl was having a stroke. Her body’s level of creatinine, a chemical excreted by the kidneys, was at more than 10 times the normal level.
“The doctor didn’t understand why I was up and walking and talking,” Viohl said. “He said I should be in a coma or dead.”
Viohl was in the hospital for almost a month, with nearly three weeks in the intensive care unit.
Because of her body’s creatinine levels, she began peritoneal dialysis, which required her to spend about 12 hours per day connected to a dialysis machine.
Her dialysis machine was portable, so she returned to work. A spare bathroom was turned into a sterile environment, where she could plug into dialysis. She and her family settled into a rhythm and some semblance of normalcy, until that December.
One morning, Viohl was getting ready for work and noticed Ava’s arm was bent in a strange way. The girl, about 2-1/2 years old, couldn’t stand up. Ava was having a stroke, and Viohl recognized her daughter’s neurological problem right away.
“I have a sister that is paralyzed and has seizures,” she said. “I called my mom and told her to call Children’s Hospital (of Wisconsin) and tell them we were on our way. We spent Christmas that year at Children’s Hospital, and Ava walked a few steps on Christmas Eve.”
Viohl now believes Ava’s stroke was caused by complications from children’s cough medicine. Ava recovered relatively quickly from the stroke. She is now a healthy, active 6-year-old.
Still, Viohl’s health journey was far from over. In February 2004, Viohl suffered a second stroke while attending an ice skating show at the Bradley Center.
“I came to in a room in the back (of the Bradley Center),” Viohl said. “I couldn’t see. I couldn’t speak. But I could hear conversations. I knew I’d had a stroke then because I heard someone say, ‘Is her face always that way?'”
Viohl spent 11 days in the hospital. She continued her peritoneal dialysis, and she thought she was finally on the road to recovery.
She had a third stroke that April.
“I was at home with the kids and was talking on the phone with a friend,” Viohl said. “I said I felt a little tingly, and my friend said I was slurring my words. I said, ‘This is really inconvenient now.'”
The third stroke was relatively minor, Viohl said, and she didn’t have any lasting effects from it. After a few days, she was able to resume her work and family life. She continued her home dialysis, and once again, she settled into a normal routine.
During a return trip from lobbying in Madison in the summer of 2005, Viohl started feeling pain in her right arm. Her boss, Craig Peterson, president and chief executive officer of Zigman Joseph Stephenson, was driving and asked her repeatedly if she wanted to go to the emergency room, but Viohl resisted.
“After you’ve spent so much time in the hospital, it’s hard to go back,” she said.
When the pain worsened, she and Peterson went to the Wisconsin Heart Hospital.
After several tests, doctors told her the same clotting problem that had caused one of her strokes had caused a minor heart attack. After a few days, Viohl was back on her feet and returned to work.
It wouldn’t last long.
The catheter into her abdomen that allowed her to give herself peritoneal dialysis had caused an infection. Viohl was in the hospital for more than three weeks. Even worse, she had to switch to hemodialysis – a technique that scrubs a patient’s blood every three days. Hemodialysis is the more common form of dialysis, in which patients travel to a clinic and are connected to a machine for several hours.
Although her treatments were less frequent, Viohl said the change didn’t help her outlook on life.
“It was horrible,” she said. “It drained my spirit. For the first time, I felt like I didn’t want to do it. For the first time, I felt like I was sick. It was beyond exhausting.”
Viohl’s dialysis routine would often leave her so drained that she would have to lie on a cot in her office at work, trying to take phone calls with clients. Although the hemodialysis was keeping her alive, she started to wonder how long she could tolerate the treatments.
Turning the corner
Viohl, who had been put on a waiting list for a transplant several years earlier, started making regular calls to the transplant clinic, asking when they thought a kidney might be available.
Specialists routinely told Viohl she might have to wait several more years for a kidney.
However, a phone call at about 4 a.m. 18 months ago changed all that. An official from the University of Wisconsin Medical Center called, asking Viohl if she wanted to get a new kidney that day. Viohl quickly drove herself to Madison, arranged for someone to stay with her children and called Ingmar, who was traveling for work.
“I walked into the ER with a big smile and said, ‘I’m here for my transplant,'” she said.
Surgery began a short time later, and the next thing Viohl remembers, she awoke in terrible pain.
After three anti-rejection treatments, Viohl’s kidney still wasn’t functioning properly. Physicians at the UW Medical Center, some of the finest in the Midwest, were puzzled. For a few tense weeks, it appeared that Viohl’s new kidney might not work.
The doctors decided she needed one more surgery to correct a problem with the new kidney.
A few hours after the surgery, Viohl knew it was a success.
“I had to pee,” she said, noting that it was the first time she had a normal urination in almost three years.
Closure
Viohl received the transplant more than one year ago, and she’s had no major problems since she returned home after the surgery.
She is back at work full-time.
“We just kind of go with the flow,” Peterson said. “That’s one of the things with being a lobbyist – it’s nice to be flexible. It’s not necessarily five days a week, 9 to 5.”
Viohl and her daughter have endured a long, tortuous ordeal.
“I was home (from the transplant) about a month, and I’d just had the last tube removed,” Viohl said. “It was the first time in (Ava’s) life she could remember me not having a tube poking out of me. She said to me, ‘You’re not sick. You’re not going to die.”
