Hey everybody. In episode 25, we introduced you to Mary Jane and Lizzie Parnell.

Mary Jane was married to Charles Wakefield Jr.'s lead attorney, Buddy Parnell.

Lizzy is their daughter.

During the course of our conversation about Buddy and his time on the Wakefield trial.

The Parnell's told me about Lizzie's older brother Sefton, a child who endured five kidney

transplants during his 13 years.

When Buddy Parnell was working on Wakefield's case, Sefton was waiting on his first

transplant. While this bonus episode has nothing directly to do with the Wakefield case, I wanted

to share this part of the story with you so you have some sort of idea

about the real people affected by the Wakefield case and what their lives were

like afterward. So here's more of our conversation in which Mary Jane explains how

Sefton's condition basically required the family to move in to Mass General

Hospital in Boston and what that meant for them during the historic blizzard of 1978 when Buddy was stuck in Greenville and a blizzard separated him from his family and a critically ill child.

He had posterior urethral valves, which means that there was a blockage that occurred in utero,

so that by the time that he was born, the damage was done.

So he started with about 25% function in one kidney.

One kidney never really formed.

The kidney that did form was destroyed in utero.

You can get by on 50% function with a kidney, but 25% uh-uh. The first transplant, the doctors were

literally going out to a pasture to a horse and getting horse serum, which was

what they used to control rejection and bringing it back

illegally and made me sign a paper so that the federal government would not find out about it.

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