St. Edward's University News (Austin, Tex.), Vol. 40, No. 3, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 1, 1998 Page: 4 of 12
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PAGE 4 ST. EDWARD’S UNIVERSITY NEWS
WINTER 1998
A STUDENT’S STORY
Illness leads student on eye-opening journey
By Yvette Guerrero, ’98
/
(Continued on Page 6)
SEU FAMILY
For this clan, Christmas at SEU is a Dailey ritual
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At the Festival of Lights Dec. 5, members of the Dailey family gather with their candles,
continuing a long family tradition.
Yvette Guerrero,
right, sits with her
cousin, Carmen
Aguilar, who gave
up a kidney for her.
and SEU have always gone together.
“I remember being fairly small and
coming to midnight Mass,” says Danica,
who was 6 when the family began
attending the Mass in 1970. “For me, all
my life we’ve done this.”
thought that it would be so hard for them
to understand the issues that I now had
to deal with. My surgery was on
December 10, 1996, and so at Christmas
I was still very susceptible to catching
anything that was out there. It was cold
and rainy and there was no way I could
attend dinner with my brothers and
sisters and the 20 children that would be
there. It just wasn’t the smart thing to do.
But they couldn’t understand it.
So, now I look back and realize that
having an organ transplant isn’t some-
thing that a person goes through alone.
There are many other people who will be
affected. Unintentionally, my family was
the cause of some difficulties at this
chapel a part of their Christmas ritual.
“We started coming because we
were close to the Holy Cross brothers
and they invited us,” explains Virginia.
“When the IHM sisters came, that
added to the impetus.”
In addition to midnight Mass, the
Daileys have been regulars at the annual
Festival of Lights for its entire 19-year
history. In fact, this season’s ceremony
was the first that Virginia and Jack have
missed since it began in 1978.
Still, several of the kids and their
families kept the tradition alive, though
the showing was a “meager” 13 people.
“Often we have to call somewhere to
see if they can seat 26 for dinner
afterward,” says Virginia, who plans to
start a new streak next year.
Virginia’s disappointment over
missing the Festival of Lights was
tempered by the knowledge that
daughter Eileen Evans, who lives in
Oregon and is the only child not in
driving distance from the Daileys’
Cedar Creek home, would be coming
home for Christmas. It was the first
time in four years that the whole family
was together for the holiday.
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Gathered ’round the Christmas tree
with mom, dad, spouses and children
were Erin Hanna, ’72, Eileen ’73,
Kevin, Sheila Bowman, Kathlyn, ’78,
Brian, ’83, Regan, ’83, MBA ’86,
Shannon Boatright, ’85, and Danica,
’86, MAHS ’94.
For Danica, the youngest, Christmas
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chest.
In all, I took two separate semesters
off of school. I tried to use my time
wisely and pick up different hobbies,
but nothing compared to the experi-
ences of college life.
Eventually, some members of my
family decided to go through the
necessary testing to see if one of them
could donate a kidney to me. This was
one of the hardest parts because not
every one of my brothers and sisters
wanted to do this. I could never come
out and ask, so I just waited to see who
would do it.
Of nine siblings, four attempted the
testing. One by one, three were elimi-
nated. That left only Rosemary, and she
sure was confident. I think that at that
point Rosemary wanted to be a match as
much or even more than I did. Her
enthusiasm was thousands of times
greater than mine. I didn’t ever want to
set myself up for a fall. I did it anyway.
She was so close to completing the
testing, and all was going so well that
she and the transplant coordinator set up
a tentative date for the surgery. It never
happened. The final testing resulted in
Rosemary finding out that she had a
condition that, although not dangerous,
would make her more prone to getting
kidney stones. The conclusion was that
the kidney would not be a good one for
me to have, and I spent that tentative
surgery date attending an Aerosmith
concert with my boyfriend, Chris. That
was September 1994.
It wasn’t until two years later that
my cousin, Carmen Aguilar, ap-
proached me and told me that she had
started the preliminary testing and
everything was good so far. Now she
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“ on’t talk to Virginia and Jack
)) Dailey about St. Nicholas. For
Emmd this couple and their nine kids,
the patron saint of Christmas is none
other than jolly old St. Edward. And
with the way their family is growing (14
grandchildren, three great-grandchil-
dren), St. Nick can use all the help he
can get.
The SEU community has been an
integral part of the Dailey Christmas
celebration for three decades, since
shortly after Virginia joined the faculty
in 1965. She retired last year as associ-
ate vice president for academic affairs
and professor of English and linguistics.
The title is a mouthful, but no more so
than the litany of her children who have
graduated from St. Edward’s —seven
undergraduates in all, two of whom
went on for master’s degrees. Another,
Kevin Dailey, attended St. Edward’s
High School until it closed in 1967.
“St. Edward’s is very strongly
intertwined with our family life — 32
years worth,” says Virginia. “It is a
second home.”
Since 1970, the clan has made mid-
night Mass at Our Lady Queen of Peace
" he moment I realized that I was
at a turning point, I breathed a
sigh of relief. The past three
years have been so trying and so
emotional that I thought I was never
going to find the meaning behind it all.
But I did.
Three years ago I began a journey
that I never dreamed I would take. It
was my second semester of college
when I became sick. Actually, I never
realized this on my own; it took three
hospital stays and a major reality check
to come to the conclusion that I had
end-stage renal disease. The doctors
told me that I would eventually have to
be on dialysis and maybe have a kidney
transplant.
Even after reading all of the pamph-
lets and watching all of the videos, I
still did not give this disease the respect
it deserved and the result was a painful
and quick one. Instead of the year and a
half that the doctors predicted before
the dialysis would begin, it was only
four months. That was my fault because
I still had that immortality frame of
mind that a lot of us have at 19. Now at
age 23,1 have learned my lesson.
I was so angry because I didn’t want
to be different. This was supposed to be
my time to shine, my time to go out on
my own and do the things that I always
wanted to do. Now everything I did
would have to be scheduled around a
three-times-per-week, four-hour dialysis
treatment. It was so bad that I didn’t
want to go back to school in the fall and
live in the, dorms because I was too
embarrassed to let everyone see me
walking around with a catheter in my
wanted to continue and try to be the
one who would give me a “new”
kidney. Although she and I hadn’t been
close in our childhood, as we grew
older, our relationship had grown
stronger. Thanks to her, I now live free
from dialysis and all of the restrictions
that bound me for so long.
Carmen is the one who, despite all of
the difficulties that she had to face, put
my needs before her comfort. Even
when she said she was a little scared,
she was never hesitant. After a success-
ful surgery we both found strength in
each other to face the complications
that came not as a result of the surgery,
but as a result of family interference.
This leads to another winding road
in my journey — the family. I never
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St. Edward's University News (Austin, Tex.), Vol. 40, No. 3, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 1, 1998, newspaper, January 1, 1998; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1528726/m1/4/: accessed May 21, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting St. Edward’s University.