Dave Zweifel's Plain Talk: Restoring Hope Transplant House deserves our support

Dave Zweifel  —  6/30/2008 5:14 am

Cindy Herbst's patience is far from running out, but it is starting to wear a little thin.

It has been two years since she and her husband, inspired by their experience at the Mayo Clinic, formed a nonprofit corporation here to open a house to help transplant patients and their families get through their ordeal.

This is the home of the University of Wisconsin Hospitals, after all, where more transplants are performed every year than at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Yet Rochester has a facility -- the Gift of Life Transplant House -- that transplant candidates and recipients can call home while they ferry back and forth for all the injections, medications, and hospital visits involved with this growing piece of modern, lifesaving medicine.

The Rochester facility, which has been so successful it's being doubled in size, came into Cindy and Brian Herbst's life when Brian's father, Wes, underwent a bone marrow stem cell transplant at Mayo. The transplant house was a godsend for Wes, who spent nine weeks there waiting and recovering, and the rest of the family.

If the home hadn't existed, it would have meant staying in a hotel or motel, which aren't clinically sanitized for the infection-prone transplant recipient. It was either that or drive grueling and uncomfortable miles back and forth several times a week.

After that experience, the Herbsts vowed to open a facility like Rochester's. They immediately stumbled on a 115-year-old Victorian mansion on Parmenter and Terrace Avenue in downtown Middleton, secured a mortgage with the help of Capitol Bank, and began the process of raising funds to remodel the home to provide 16 bedrooms with private baths, a modern kitchen and family friendly common areas.

It's been agonizingly slow, though, raising the funds to get the home opened.

And that's what bothers Cindy, who every week hears from the family of a transplant patient at UW Hospitals inquiring to see if they can stay there. There are so many people who need the care and a loving atmosphere, she laments. The longer it takes to get the facility open, the more people she has to turn away, and to put it bluntly, that's torturing her.

Cindy showed me through the Restoring Hope Transplant House last week. Strang Inc., Vogel Brothers Builders, Arnold and O'Sheridan, the Mayo Corp. and the Hooper Corp. have all donated services and ideas to make the house practical for patients and their families, and also to pay homage to the historic grandeur of the home built by the Pierstorff lumber family of Middleton in the late 1890s.

The home went through many incarnations. It was once split into first-floor living quarters for a family with offices on the second floor and later became a nursing home for Alzheimer's patients. But the integrity of the house is still intact with beautiful wood floors and marvelous old-fashioned woodwork throughout. A series of oversized windows look out onto the porch and yard outside.

On the tour I met Mary Baliker, who works at the UW Hospitals' cancer center. Mary has undergone four kidney transplants at the UW, the first when she was 17 and a high school kid in La Crosse. Oh, what she would have given for a place like Restoring Hope, she said, recounting the painful car rides between La Crosse and Madison.

Mary said that the transplant doctors at the UW are enthusiastic backers of the project. Dr. Hans Sollinger and Dr. Walter Longo sit on the board and others have lent support, both monetarily and in kind. They know how a dedicated house for transplant patients can aid recovery and boost morale, she said.

Former Packer great John Brockington, a transplant recipient himself, has visited the home and UW football coach Bret Bielema, whose sister was an organ donor, has cut some public service ads for the house.

Slightly less than $300,000 has been raised. Once the figure tops the $300,000 mark, Cindy is confident construction can get under way. The ultimate goal is to raise $1 million to pay off the mortgage, finance the remodeling, and let transplant patients and their families stay at the house for $30 a day, or even less for those without financial means.

With any luck the initial $300,000 goal can be met in the next few weeks. We all can help. Restoring Hope will take any donation, no matter how large or small, and those gifts are 100 percent tax deductible.

The house's Web site, www.restoringhope.org, has the plans for the home and lots of other information. You can contribute there or donate by mail: Restoring Hope Transplant House, c/o Capitol Bank, 710 N. High Point Road, Madison WI 53717.

Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.

Dave Zweifel  —  6/30/2008 5:14 am