The ultimate assist: Penguins fans connect for life-saving donation
Let’s call it the Miracle Just Off The Ice.
One year ago — on Saturday, March 31, 2018 — anyone who had arrived early at Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena to watch the Penguins‘ pregame skate before their game against the Montreal Canadiens probably caught a flash of a day-glo yellow sign, in an aisle, five or six rows up from the glass. Then they probably forgot all about it, as it was immediately lost in the mosaic of signs, banners and countless other swaths of yellow mixed in with all of the Penguin black and gold.
But the message scrawled in black marker across this piece of poster board was different, although that was not apparent at first glance. “Hey Guentzel, I’d love a hockey stick …” was nothing original. Then there was the amendment to that request: “… but what I need is a kidney. 717-456-0766.” The other side of the sign, the one facing the ice, was more direct. “Calling all hockey fans! I need a Kidney! Kidney! Kidney! Gratefully yours, Kelly.”
Kelly Sowatsky, then 30, was the woman holding that sign aloft, arms burning, desperate to get the attention of anyone who might be willing to save her life. Beneath her No. 59 Jake Guentzel jersey and buried within her tiny, 5-foot frame, Sowatsky’s kidneys were dying, having crashed into end-stage renal failure, their function down to only 7 percent.
“For 15 minutes I’m standing there, holding this thing up over my head,” Sowatsky remembers. “Just hoping that somebody will see it.”
Attention had never been a problem for Sowatsky before. From the moment she was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, she was the kind of kid who seemed to carry her own spotlight around with her. She was energetic. Yes, she was tiny, but she never saw that as a setback. Her parents, Jackie and Brian Sowatsky, still smile in awe when they recall Kelly’s little legs churning up and down youth soccer fields like a piston engine. Even after she was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic at the tender age of 8, she simply schooled herself on needles and pumps and refused to let it slow her down. She wanted to be a country music singer, and she made that happen too, moving to Nashville, landing a record deal, touring the nation and even flirting with the sales charts under the stage name Kelly Parkes.
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Her life took a sharp turn on Dec. 24, 2015. As she was helping her mother make Christmas Eve dinner, Kelly’s hands started to shake, the color drained from her face, and her temperature leapt to 104 degrees. A urinary tract infection had turned septic and that infection had worked its way into her lungs, inhibiting her ability to breathe so much that she had to be put on a ventilator for nearly two weeks. An aggressive course of medicines staved off the infection and saved her life. But that treatment came with a cost. It had ravaged her kidneys. When she was finally discharged 2½ months later, Sowatsky was told that she probably would need routine kidney checkups for the rest of her life.
“[The kidneys] rebounded pretty quickly, like right back up to 75 or 80 percent,” she says of the first months after leaving the hospital. “So, OK, we’ll come back and get checkups, but whatever, I’m ready to get on with living my life.”
Now living in Pennsylvania, she went back to school to earn her teaching degree. She fell in love with a fellow teacher, Tyler Hart, who shared her passion for music. She soon developed a passion for his other two loves, Star Wars and the Pittsburgh Penguins. This was 2016, shortly after the Pens had won the Stanley Cup. Kelly didn’t know that. Heck, Kelly didn’t even know what the Stanley Cup was.
“She’s Kelly, so she went from zero to 100 in essentially a day,” Hart says, an unapologetically proud smile breaking across his face. “All of the sudden, she’s watching the games a bit more. And now she’s screaming at the TV with me.”
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