SUNLAND : Lung Patient Fights On but Bills Pile Up

At the end of her daily trip to work from her Sunland home to Warner Center in Woodland Hills, Kathy Kilroy pulls her oxygen tanks out of her car and begins the long walk from the parking lot into the office, resting at least twice along the way.

“I feel myself getting weaker now,” said Kilroy, 50, who is on the waiting list for a lung transplant. “I used to stop only once. Now, it’s two or three times.”

But Kilroy, who suffers from lupus and pulmonary hypertension, is defying the odds.

When she was put on the waiting list for a lung donor, she was told that unless she received a transplant within two years, she would die.

That was two years and seven months ago.

“I’m stubborn,” said Kilroy, who has inspired a group of her friends to form a fund-raising organization to help pay her staggering $78,000 debt, as well as the $1,000 a month in insurance premiums and the $800 a month needed for the oxygen that keeps her diseased lungs breathing.

“I just still haven’t given up,” she said.

Sometimes, Thea Johns, Kilroy’s neighbor and friend of 25 years, teases Kilroy about her stubbornness.

But Johns said that she worries that perhaps Kilroy should not be working six hours a day as a bookkeeper--one of the few ways in which Kilroy is able to help to stem the mounting financial troubles.

“But then again, if she wasn’t that stubborn, she probably wouldn’t be alive,” Johns said.

Johns is one of the founding members of “Friends of Kathy Kilroy,” created through Verdugo Hills Television Inc., where Kilroy also has worked.

The group organizes mailers, parties, special events and searches for money.

And Kilroy continues to wait for a new lung, an organ which is much more delicate and difficult to obtain than a heart.

Kilroy said she had no medical problems until she was 23 when she started experiencing a persistent fever and achiness.

At first, the vague symptoms were dismissed as flu, but later her condition was diagnosed as lupus, a chronic, degenerative disease in which healthy tissues are attacked by the body’s own immune system.

Doctors suspect that lupus is the cause of the pulmonary hypertension, a condition that keeps the blood from flowing properly between the heart and lungs.

Meanwhile, Kilroy must bring her oxygen tanks with her everywhere, carefully planning out how much she will need to keep a constant supply going to her lungs.

She sleeps with her oxygen tube connected to her nose and uses a 50-foot tube around the house.

After waking and dressing in the morning, Kilroy has to take a nap before leaving on her 45-minute commute to work.

After a day at work, she said she has no energy left.

“Each day, it gets a little harder to get dressed,” said Kilroy, who used to be active in the local Rotary Club and was an organizer of Sunland’s Fourth of July Parade. “But keeping as active as I am has helped.”

Her friends help, too, but money and resources are slowly drying up.

“The hardest thing Kathy has had to do is ask people for help,” Johns said.

“I let it go to the point where I didn’t have any choice,” Kilroy said. “It was either that or bankruptcy.”

She remembers the first time her friends sent out a mailing list asking for help.

“Every time a check would come in, I would start crying,” Kilroy said.

Donations to Kilroy can be sent to Friends of Kathy Kilroy, 10303 O’Dell Ave., Sunland 91040.