Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
The pair will undergo surgery today, but that hasn't slowed the torrent of jokes between them.
By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 19, 2001
Joseph Caltabiano stood against a bulging bag in the Tampa International Airport terminal. His black leather jacket, worn hours earlier in a brisk Long Island frost, lay slung over the suitcase.
"What, you stranding me here?" he asked as his mother rushed toward him, arms wide for a hug.
The 31-year-old had walked right past his parents, Martin and Joanne Caltabiano, both 57, of Spring Hill, in the throng getting off the tram. He got his luggage before they found him 45 minutes later.
"You had five minutes and I was renting a car," he joked, chomping on his gum.
Mom peppered him with questions. Dad walked silently until she left for the restroom. On the way to the elevator, the feisty son playfully elbowed his tight-lipped dad.
They seemed the typical American family. A grown son visiting a retired couple.
But this trip wasn't about fishing or long afternoons on the links.
Joseph Caltabiano arrived last week to give one of his kidneys to his dad. And like most of their relationship, the seriousness of the visit's purpose was veiled in jokes.
"Watch it," Joseph Caltabiano called out as a car backed close to Mr. Caltabiano in the parking garage. "You're going to get wiped out. And then I'll save myself a kidney."
Today, at Tampa General Hospital, surgeons will transplant a kidney from Joseph to Martin, who has struggled with failing kidneys for more than a year.
When it became apparent in the past year that Mr. Caltabiano needed the operation, the family turned to his wife and son. Tests results came back as a shock to everyone. No one expected Joseph to be such a good donor match.
Joseph is adopted.
Yet his blood type is compatible to Mr. Caltabiano's, and three out of six blood antigens match -- a less critical factor with the advancement of modern medicine but helpful so the body won't reject the foreign organ.
Blood ties or not, Joseph's bond to the only man he's ever considered his father were unshakable. Hearing the results of his blood work, he hung up the phone and called Florida.
"Mom, you better sit down, because I'm a better match for Dad than you are," he told Joanne.
She burst into tears.
She feared for his health, a young man with a wife and young child to support.
She turned and saw Martin at the kitchen table, tears streaming down the proud man's face.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked her. "Do you want me to tell my son no?"
Joanne was wracked with guilt.
"No," she replied. "I want you to have this second chance in life."
Still, she worries. "Where do you draw the line when you know your husband is going to be in one (operating) room and your son in another?"
Joseph wouldn't hear any of it. For him, the answer was far more simple.
Asked about his decision on the drive back to Hernando County from the airport, he turned in his seat.
"It's kind of obvious," he said over his shoulder. "He's my father. I love him."
The young mother asked for one thing. Only that her son be given to a good, Catholic Italian family.
With that request, the Caltabianos were called. The young couple from Long Island had been married for two years by 1970 and thought they could not have a child of their own. They had tried to adopt, waiting for a year. Then, at three days old, a baby boy with jet black hair and bright blue eyes arrived.
"I thank God every day that he was placed into our arms," Joanne said.
She and Martin had met several years earlier at a christening. The tall, quiet man quickly locked eyes with the spunky young woman with green eyes.
Six months after the adoption, Joanne found out she was pregnant.
As her daughter and son grew up -- raised practically as twins -- Joanne clipped out articles and pictures about adoptions for the day she would tell Joseph the truth.
But he beat her to it. At age 9, driving to the store one day, he told his mother he had a dream he was adopted and asked if it was true.
She pulled off the road.
"This is just wonderful," she remembered thinking. "I have to stop in the supermarket parking lot and tell him the most important thing in his life. I was going to kill him."
She told the young boy the family could help him find his biological parents.
"He looked at me and said, "You and Dad are the only parents I want to know,' " she recalled. "I was hysterical."
Joseph still refuses to delve into the past beyond the life the Caltabianos gave him. Doctors say his health is strong and any signs of future blood pressure or kidney failure problems would already be apparent in his system.
Joseph and Lori grew up not seeing their dad too much. Martin worked two and three jobs in court security, as a florist or driving a limo.
But Joseph always had a special way with his father, says Lori, 30, whose married name is now Sim. She teaches math at Hernando High School.
"My father is very serious; he's a man of few words," she said. He showed his concern with oil changes and car repairs.
"But Joseph would always get him to laugh," she said.
The television showed chopped vegetables and meats.
"Why do we have to watch the cooking channel? My stomach is eating itself inside out," Joseph said last week in a waiting room with his parents at Tampa General Hospital. He was there for a CAT-scan so doctors could map out a route to his kidneys.
He hadn't been allowed to eat that morning before the tests.
To pass the time, he quickly began to tease his dad about wearing a mask after the operation to avoid picking up a cold while he's on immunity suppression drugs.
"They'll put you in a plastic bubble like John Travolta," he said.
"See what I have to put up with?" Martin said. "He drives me crazy all day. Yesterday I misplaced my wallet. I put it in the closet."
"That was your own fault," Joseph said, laughing.
After the transplant today, Martin will take medicine so that his body won't reject Joseph's kidney, said his doctor, Dr. P.M. Reddy, a nephrologist with offices in Spring Hill and Hudson.
After a recovery time of several weeks, Joseph will lead a completely normal life, he said.
Without the transplant, Martin would have been on a waiting list for a kidney for at least a year or two, Dr. Reddy said.
The transplant spared him from dialysis. By the time Reddy started seeing him this summer, Mr. Caltabiano had already lost 70 percent of his kidney function following decades of high blood pressure.
Dialysis can include three treatments by machine a week or once every night to flush toxins out of the body. Both forms come with possible infections and complications. Dialysis users only have a life span of about six to 10 years, he said.
When asked about Joseph, Martin hides his emotions, much like his son.
"He'll be okay," Martin says.
But at night, he worries.
"How will I ever thank my son for doing something like this?" he asks her.