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August 4, 2004Woman with a planNurse overcomes health issues to achieve her goalsByRecord-Eagle staff writer Jenni Krnc has a special calling to work with hospice patients and their families. After all, she's been at death's door more than once. Krnc, who lives in Frankfort, battled multiple life-threatening health problems to fulfill her dream of becoming a registered nurse this spring. Now she hopes to use her experience - and eight years of hospice nursing as a licensed practical nurse - to help others nearing the end of their lives. "There were only two (areas of nursing) I wanted to do," said Krnc, 53, going on to list hospice and obstetrics. "One was living and one was dying. They're the most intimate things in a person's life." Originally from Livonia, Krnc (pronounced "kerntz") worked with the consumer marketing information company R.L. Polk before deciding to become a nurse. While living in Tampa, Fla. she earned her practical nursing license and was introduced to the specialized program of hospice care through a hospice rotation. "I knew right away that's what I wanted to do," she said. "It was like I just made a difference in someone's life, whether it was the patient or the family." After working for a time in Tampa, she decided to escape the heat of Florida and settle permanently in northern Michigan, where she had vacationed for years. She moved to Frankfort in the summer of 1996 and took a job as a hospice nurse with Munson Medical Center. In 2001, determined to advance in her profession, she enrolled in the bachelor's degree nursing program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. But about a year into it, she began having health problems she attributes to decades of living with diabetes and high cholesterol. "My calves would cramp and hurt and I couldn't walk," she said. "That was the beginning of the downhill part." Doctors told her she had peripheral vascular disease and recommended bypass surgery in both legs to restore circulation. The treatment worked for a time - until she injured her ankle in a fall. Because of poor circulation, gangrene set in and surgeons had to remove all the toes on one foot and then half of the foot itself. What followed was a series of setbacks that threatened to end her dreams, from heart failure and a stroke that left her "good" foot dead to visual problems that made her legally blind. "Every time I had something done, something else would go wrong," she said. Between doctors and hospitals, crutches and wheelchairs, however, she continued to attend classes and study groups. She even managed to work for Hospice of Northern Virginia and in the Occupational Health Office of Human Resources at the university. "I thought, 'I've already gone halfway through it. If I die doing it, I'm going to die smart,'¡" she said. "My teachers were so wonderful. Some people who were doing seminars would come to me. I would take incompletes and make them up the next semester. It should have taken me one-and-a-half years to get my RN and BSN and it took me four years - double the time." Four months before graduating, Krnc began to experience kidney failure that left her too sick to attend classes. At the urging of the university, she returned home to Frankfort to attend to her health and finish up her studies long-distance. On May 15 she made one final trip to Fairfax to receive her diploma with the rest of her class. She was the last one called up on stage, where she accepted tears and applause from fellow students, teachers, her parents and 28-year-old daughter Jenelle. "She is one of the most admired people I know," said Rose Brenkus, Krnc's adviser and a faculty member of the College of Nursing and Health Science. "She is a very, very determined woman and she was going to finish her degree regardless of anything. There were days that you could tell she just didn't feel well and she somehow managed to come in. I admire her greatly for everything she went through health-wise and never giving up on her goal." Krnc credits her studies with helping her get through the worst times. "All I know is it saved my life because it gave me a goal," she said. "They told me I was going to die 20 years ago and I'm still here." She believes something else was at work, too. "I believe in God and the power of prayer," she said. Although she has only 13 percent of her kidney function and hasn't been able to work for two years, Krnc is looking forward to a return to nursing. After switching from haemodialysis to peritoneal dialysis, a less painful and more portable way of pulling waste products and poisons from the body, she is able to carry out her own treatment overnight. As a nurse, she is aware that dialysis is not a permanent solution. She is on a kidney transplant waiting list and may be able to receive an organ from her daughter, who shares the same rare blood type. But the blocked arteries in her legs may keep any transplant from being successful. Still, she remains optimistic about her prognosis and makes a point of surrounding herself with positive people. "I think about (dying), but I really don't think about it a lot anymore because it's negative," she said. "Obviously God has a plan for me, because already I shouldn't be here. I should have been gone five times."
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