Lifeline

For many stay-at-home mothers of young children, life is full of play dates, trips to the park or zoo and other fun activities.

But for Rebecca “Becca” Polston, caring for her 2 1/2-year-old son Rhylon Edwards mostly means days spent at home, just the two of them, and long drives to Dallas for regular doctor and therapy appointments.

Sometimes there are stays at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas that last a week or longer.

Hospital stays are much more familiar to Rhylon than playgrounds or pizza.

Rhylon was born with End Stage Renal Disease (ESDR), which is stage five of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). He spent his first 56 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Children’s.

“They said his kidneys are just dead,” Becca said of Rhylon’s doctors. Rhylon has had nine surgeries in his short life, one of which was to remove one of his kidneys. His remaining kidney barely functions, so he must undergo 10 hours of dialysis every night.

At bedtime, Becca dons a surgical mask and hooks Rhylon up to the dialysis machine, a process that takes about 15 minutes. She weighs him and checks his blood pressure both before and after the hours-long process.

Rhylon has undergone the nightly ritual since he was 3 months old. Although he has his own bedroom, he sleeps with his mother because Becca fears she might not otherwise hear the unit’s alarm if Rhylon lays on the line and blocks it or some other problem develops.

If Becca can get her son’s weight up to 35 pounds, he will be placed on a list to receive a kidney transplant.

Gaining those very important 9 pounds, though, has been a challenge and lately has become increasingly so.

Rhylon has never been interested in solid food, which Becca said is a byproduct of his disease, and lately he hasn’t wanted to drink his PediaSure. She assumes that maybe he has grown tired of it.

“We’ve been at 26 pounds since Thanksgiving,” said the 28-year-old single mom.

Friday will bring yet another drive from Granbury to Dallas for yet another doctor’s appointment.

This one will be to have a feeding tube inserted into Rhylon’s little body.

GOING IT ALONE

Becca was born in Fort Worth but grew up in the Justin area, which is in Den-ton County.

For a time after Rhylon was released from the NICU, she lived with family members of Rhylon’s father. After that, she said, she moved to Gran-bury, where her grandmother lives.

Rhylon’s father is in prison, Becca said, because of drugs. She said her own parents were “pill addicts” while she and her sisters were growing up.

“His dad has a drug addiction that he just cannot kick,” she said. “He can’t leave the drugs alone. He’s been in and out of jail three times since Rhylon was born.

“He didn’t come around even when I was living with his parents in Justin up until September 2017. He was at the NICU maybe five days out of the 56 days.”

Sitting in the aging public-housing duplex that she shares with her child, Becca speaks of Rhylon’s father in a matter-of-fact tone. There seems to be no hint of either anger or sympathy.

“I don’t do drugs,” she said. “I’ve never had an addiction. I guess part of me thought that once Rhylon was born he would straighten up.

“I don’t understand it. My son fights for his life every day. I refuse to believe (Rhylon’s father) has a disease. My son has a disease that he has no control over. It’s hard for me to think of drug addiction as a disease.”

Becca said she worked as a Certified Nurses Assistant (CNA) right up to the day that Rhylon was born.

There had been some problems during the pregnancy and she was being regularly monitored, she said. But then one day when she went in for a regular doctor’s appointment, the doctor discovered that she had no amniotic fluid.

Labor would need to be induced immediately, he said.

Rhylon entered the world six weeks early, with problems of his own.

GIFTS FROM STRANGERS

Last August, one month after they moved into their two-bedroom duplex not far from the Granbury Post Office, Becca and Rhylon were on a highway in Arlington. They were driving back from Dallas when they became victims in a hit-and-run accident.

Becca said that she was driving in the middle lane and remembers seeing a vehicle in the left-land lane. She assumes that maybe the driver was trying to merge when he struck the driver’s side of her car at about 70 mph, sending her car spinning.

The car slammed into a concrete median on the side where Rhylon was sleeping.

Luckily, both were uninjured but their vehicle was totaled. Becca only had liability insurance.

Unbeknownst to Becca, one of her friends in Justin, Courtney Tidwell, contacted Dallas radio station KLTY 94.9. The station plays contemporary Christian music and operates a charity called Speak Love.

The station coordinated with Tidwell to have her invite Becca and Rhylon to meet her for dinner at Chili’s in Roanoke one day last September.

Becca didn’t know what to think when the manager approached their table with a strange request.

“The manager was like, you guys come out here, I need to speak to you right now,” she said. “I was terrified.”

Waiting outside was a crew from the radio station, positioned in front of a promotional backdrop.

Station representatives presented Becca and Rhylon with a check for $1,000.

The promotional backdrop then parted to reveal a Grapevine car dealer – and a 2014 white Ford Focus.

The man handed Becca the keys.

The radio station and the car dealer “blessed us with this car,” Becca said from her living room, the donated vehicle parked outside. “I didn’t have to pay a dime.”

The radio station had packed the back of the car with toys for Rhylon.

KLTY spokeswoman Kally Robinson said that the radio station receives about 500 requests per month through its Speak Love 501c3 nonprofit.

The staff reads every request and selections are made after thorough vetting, she said. The station contacted the car dealer to see if he would be willing to help, too.

“We reached out to him and he said, ‘I’ll do it in a heartbeat,’” Robinson stated.

Becca said that in December the man personally paid for an oil change for the donated vehicle and loaned her another car to drive while the work was being done.

Later that day, she opened the trunk of the Ford Focus to put groceries inside and found the space packed with Christmas gifts for her and her son, she said.

THE ROAD AHEAD

After the hit-and-run but before KLTY and the car dealer got involved, a friend of Becca’s set up a GoFund-Me page on her behalf.

Money raised on that site was enough to pay six months’ worth of insurance coverage on the Ford Focus, she said. A new bill will be coming next month.

Once Rhylon has a kidney transplant, Becca is hoping to be able to go back to work. It’s a Catch-22, though, because of his Social Security disability.

She said that she worked briefly when Rhylon was younger but was told that her earnings could put a stop to Rhylon’s disability benefits.

It was just as well, anyway, she said, because shortly after starting the job Rhylon had one of his lengthy hospital stays.

She simply can’t care for him and work at the same time, she said – not with all the doctor’s appointments, therapy appointments and periodic hospital stays due to his weakened immune system.

Becca said that the “kidney team social worker” sometimes provides her with prepaid cards to put gasoline in her car. And Rhylon’s paternal grandmother helps some, too.

Right now, what she and Rhylon need most are prayers, she said. And weight gain for Rhylon.

Twenty-eight is young to be deprived of so much life, but Becca said the loneliness isn’t too bad. And she wouldn’t trade Rhylon for anything.

“I always have him,” she said. “He keeps me very busy, very occupied. It does get lonely around here but it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. I think I’m just numb.”