Glen Cove Couple Aims to Raise Kidney Awareness

Michael Zangari hasn’t let his wheelchair stop him from much. Sitting in the kitchen he remodeled with the help of family members, Zangari and his wife Janice, who also uses a wheelchair, talked about the attitude with which he approaches life’s obstacles.

“Are you familiar with Italians?” said Janice. “If I said ‘capatost,’ would you know what that means?”

“Hard head,” Michael explained – a trait said to be common to those hailing from the Calabria region of southern Italy, where he was born.   

Michael, 52, was born with spina bifida. His family moved to Glen Cove when he was 5 in hopes of finding better medical treatment after a number of surgeries failed to improve his condition.

Michael began playing wheelchair basketball when he was 12. He excelled at the sport for the next 35 years, eventually becoming commissioner of the Eastern Wheelchair Basketball Conference.

He began receiving treatment for hypertension, a condition commonly associated with the heart, in 1984. He was told to watch his levels of creatinine, the waste chemical cleared from the body by the kidneys. Those levels started to increase when he was 45, and Michael discovered his one working kidney was failing.

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The problem might have been caught earlier had doctors asked the right questions, Michael said. He had been treating a symptom rather than the root cause - his kidney.

His activity level left him so drained each day that he was barely able to stay awake past 7 p.m., and the painstaking lifestyle choices he was forced to make made life difficult.

“Do you know how hard it is, in an Italian family, not to eat tomatoes?” Janice said of her husband’s strictly regimented diet at the time.

With the real problem identified, word spread through the family that Michael would need a kidney. One of his four sisters, Annamarie Blass, was found to be a match. The operation was done the day before Michael’s fiftieth birthday in October 2009.

“I can go back to living,” Michael said. Gone is the hypertension, the fatigue and the narrow diet. Lifestyle choices, however, remain as important to him as ever.

“Michael has a responsibility to his sister,” Janice explained. He is sustained by the kidney she allowed to be cut from her body, and he now considers his health a blessing he must treat with the proper respect.

It is an attitude he sometimes finds lacking in others he meets in his line of work as a senior wheelchair technician and salesman of durable medical equipment. He often sees people who live how they want despite the probability that it will lead to the need for someone else’s organ, and it frustrates Michael.

“You become impatient with people who don’t take care of themselves,” he said.

Awareness is the tool the Zangari’s have committed themselves to. On Sunday they will participate in the 2012 Kidney Walk at Hofstra University with the goal of matching the money Michael raised last year: $2,088. His current total is $1,235, according to the National Kidney Foundation, the organization the fundraiser benefits.

“This is a silent killer,” Michael said of kidney disease. He hopes to spread the word so that the important questions he was not asked for so many years might become more common, and save others from what he went through, he said.

“It’s to make people aware that you could be the next one,” he said.