> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Pacific Palisades Parent Teacher Receives Kidney Transplant, Now Advocates Organ Donation - URL: https://www.smdp.com/051704-story/ - Published: 2004-05-17T15:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T04:18:55.000Z - Author: John Wood - Tags: Health, Pacific Palisades, #archive-import Nick Rath has 30 kids and somebody else’s kidney. The 59-year-old resident of Pacific Palisades has had three biological children, three stepchil-dren, six adopted children and 18 foster children. The oldest was born in 1966, the youngest in 1983. Despite his dedication to others, in the summer of 2000 Rath was forced to focus on himself. His kidneys stopped working, and Rath spent some 1,700 hours over two and a half years hooked up to a dialysis machine at Gambro Healthcare on 15th Street in Santa Monica. Then a colleague of Rath’s offered to donate a kidney, and the two successfully underwent surgery last December. Some 12,000 people receive kidney transplants each year. “It is absolutely a miracle,” Rath said. “I never really believed that I would feel this good.” In an interview last week, Rath said he’s gone from feeling sick all of the time to feeling almost completely normal. That’s allowed him to focus more energy on his chosen profession, as a parenting teacher. It’s also pushed Rath into a new field — advocating organ donations. Here, the Daily Press caught up with Rath and asked him “How?” and “Why?” You’ve had 30 children in your life. Do you have a favorite? “Of course.” Tell me about him or her. “It’s the one I’m standing in front of at any given moment.” What have you learned from having your 30 kids? What does it take to be a good parent? “It begins with things like consistency. Communication is so key that it’s probably at the top of the list of skills a good parent needs. And a parent needs to understand the job description of being a parent, because that job description will guide them in the decision-making process. “So a parent needs clarity about what their goals and intentions are, and they need to as often as possible be acting from those intentions, those goals. What’s an example you see of parents steering away from that? “If you want to teach your child to be honest, then you have to be honest — and not just about the big things, but about everything — because they are watching and they are paying attention. “So when the phone rings and a child answers the phone, just as they’re getting ready to pick it up, a parent can’t say, ‘If that’s for me, tell them I’m not here.’” You mentioned that communication skills are much more difficult for younger kids. Why? “Two-year-old children, when they’re told it’s bedtime they don’t go into a big thing about, ‘Well, Bobby doesn’t have to go to bed, but I have to go to bed’ and ‘I know the good TV is coming on now.’ “Two-year-olds don’t do that, but 6-year-olds, 9-year-olds and 14-year-olds do. So the communication skills that are necessary for a 2-year-old are vastly different.” How did you afford raising 30 kids? “You get paid for foster children and, other than that, you get the money by working lots of jobs. During the time we were raising children I almost never had just one job.” Was that hard on your children? “Yes.” How do you reconcile those two needs? “You do the best you can. All parents realize that raising children is a forced set of compromises, every single day. You have to make decisions about how many hours am I gonna spend doing each of the things that need to be done today. And the priorities are pressing every single day, and every single day you make decisions. “Twenty years later, you find out what the results were, and you realize that everybody makes compromises and the idea is that your communication with children is good enough that they learn from all the choices. So that they learn how to make good choices — because even when a parent is not home, that parent is still teaching their children about the choices they’re making.” What’s your success rate been? “Well success is something that’s measured in bits and pieces. “So if the question is, ‘How do you measure success?’ and you measure success by ‘Have your children gone to jail?’ I’ve done rather well. If you judge it by ‘Have your children gotten pregnant out of wedlock?’ I’ve done extremely well. If you judge it by, ‘How many of your children have gone to college?’ I’ve done pretty well... “Overall, I’m very proud of my children. Even for the things that they’ve done that were screw-ups or mistakes, they’ve learned from them.” How do you personally measure success? “The one that’s most important to me is ‘Are they living a life that makes a difference to their family, to their community?’ And if the answer’s yes, I say they’re great.” What were the holidays like at your home? “Christmas morning, when the kids were little, looked a lot like a bomb went off at Toys ‘R’ Us — cause there was wrapping paper everywhere and toys everywhere, as well as clothes and books and all that other kind of stuff. Now it is much quieter. We usually go out to dinner.” Three of your children have passed away. How do you deal with that tragedy as a family? “It teaches you the value of being together, being supportive and communicating. So that we get to express the emotions — not try and bottle them in, but to express them in appropriate ways.” Does time really heal all wounds? “It makes them easier to be with.” You’ve had diabetes for 30 years and had a successful kidney transplant last December. Do you know the person whose kidney is now yours? “Yes. He’s a very good friend of mine that I met in October of 1987... “When he found out that I needed a kidney and that my wife was not a great candidate to give me a kidney — she had volunteered and had started the process of tissue matching and all that stuff, and they had said, ‘We don’t really want you to be the donor’— when he found out, he stepped up and said, and this is a quote, ‘I have two. I really only need one. So you can have the other one.’” Did your body have any trouble accepting his kidney? “It began functioning before they had it fully hooked up.” How do you feel now — being done with dialysis? “It’s the difference from feeling sick every single day, having no real energy, to feeling almost totally normal. “When my kidneys failed, I was physically ill at least one day a week. When I first started dialysis, I was sick almost all the time — not because of the dialysis, but because of how toxic my body had become — and it took months for the dialysis to clean me up enough that I felt good. “But I still had to recognize that I was-n’t well.” Having lived through that experience, do you have a renewed outlook on life — a philosophy you’d like to share? “Yes, but I’ve had it for a long time. I’m here for a reason, and I decided that that reason that I’m here is to love people. What I’ve been given by getting a new kidney is a lot more years to do that. “My philosophy is, life is to be enjoyed as fully as possible — that I am as able to enjoy life on the positive side as I was able to endure the negative — which means life can be really good.” *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 17, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/051704.pdf?ref=smdp.com)