As a pastor and funeral director, Eric Barnes often comes face to face with people who are dealing with their own mortality. In recent years, however, he’s had several brushes with mortality himself.
This year, he has a new lease on life — and many reasons to be thankful.
Barnes has always been active – from joining both the Navy and the Marine Corps after college to traveling the state as a cultural diversity trainer for the Department of Family Support, and from being senior pastor of Trinity Fellowship Church to multi-tasking in his job at Somerset Undertaking Co. and Crematory. Additionally, he and his wife, Bernice, have raised four children and have a large extended family.
But several years ago, Barnes’ health took a turn – which led to several more turns – forcing him to slow down.
Barnes and his doctor were already keeping an eye on a chronic kidney disease, but then in December of 2019 — shortly before COVID-19 became a household name — Barnes was hospitalized with a severe cough and low oxygen levels.
Doctors were puzzled. Barnes said his doctor told him that he’d consulted his colleagues and no one could figure out what was causing him to be so sick.
“You’ve got something I’ve never seen,” Barnes’ doctor told him.
“I was in the hospital for 11 days, and they were going to put me on the vent,” Barnes recalled. “My oxygen level had dropped down to 87, and it felt like I was coughing my brains out.”
The night before he was to be put on a ventilator, members of his church visited him and prayed with him.
“The next morning, my oxygen level raised up, and they didn’t put me on the vent,” he said.
This might have seemed like good news, but in reality, Barnes was only just at the beginning of a long, difficult journey.
About ten months after his hospital stay, Barnes developed blood clots in his lungs and he suffered a mild heart attack. He didn’t know he’d had a heart attack until he went to the doctor due to symptoms of another sickness. Also, during this particular doctor visit, a COVID-19 antigen test revealed that he had, in fact, had COVID several months earlier.
Barnes’ bout with COVID-19 combined with his new heart issues caused his kidney disease to be put on the back burner for a while – but his kidneys had other ideas, and they wouldn’t be ignored. Doctors soon discovered that his chronic kidney disease had progressed to polycystic kidney disease.
“My kidneys had several cysts on them” Barnes explained. “They looked like a kidney with bubbles all over it.”
Barnes’ kidney disease progressed from stage three to stage five quickly — “and that’s when Dr. Matthew Shea said, ‘It’s time to go on dialysis,’” Barnes said.
In December of 2022, three years after fighting for his life in a hospital bed, he once again found himself in a battle for his health – undergoing grueling dialysis treatments three times a week.
“Dialysis is very taxing,” Barnes said. “I was very active, going to church, doing the work of a pastor and doing the work of an evangelist at the same time. But I’ve had to slow down. Dialysis slows you down. It’s rough. It alters your schedule. You have to go three times a week, and you sit there for three to four hours. It’s very time consuming. Then after that, they want you to go home and rest.”
Barnes admits that he followed those orders for a short while, but he quickly slipped back into his active lifestyle.
“I would go to dialysis and then I would go home, change clothes, and come to work (at the funeral home,)” Barnes said. “There were days when I would be at work and I would have to go lie down.”
During the warmer months, Barnes could be seen assisting at graveside services across the county, dressed in a dark suit and sometimes taking a seat following the service – all the while maintaining his pleasant attitude – fresh out of dialysis.
In the midst of his dialysis treatments, Barnes began having pain in his left side. Doctors discovered cancer in his left kidney, and so, in March of 2023, that kidney was removed. Now down to only one diseased kidney, Barnes was placed on a transplant waiting list.
He would spend a year and half on the list, undergoing dialysis the entire time. Doctors had explained to him that most patients who stop taking dialysis treatments will only live a few weeks.
The first of three times that Barnes received a call telling him to head to Lexington to receive a kidney, he made the mistake of telling everyone the news. The kidney that was about to become available was a 99 percent match for Barnes, so he was eagerly anticipating his transplant.
“They came in at 1:00 in the morning and said, ‘We’re sorry, but the kidney that we harvested was diseased itself, so we have to send you back home,’” Barnes said. “It was very disheartening. I had been on Facebook, told everybody, my kids, my family. … I was calling everybody, ‘I’m going to Lexington and getting my transplant,’ and then I had to turn around and come back home.”
With that lesson learned, Barnes kept all future phone calls under wraps.
The wait was long, and as a Christian, Barnes said he struggled with questions about whether he should just accept his terminal disease as God’s will – or whether he should keep on fighting to live.
“I’ve prayed and prayed, … what is God’s will for my life?” he said. “Should I trust him to the point of saying I’m not going to do dialysis and my life is in the hands of the Lord? And then I began to think, he gives us doctors and people in the medical profession, and they learn, and they have the wherewithal to make us better. And I thought, ‘Ok Lord, then I’m going to trust the doctors and put my life in their hands.”
The phone call that would not be a false alarm finally came on October 13 of this year. Barnes was getting ready to head to Sunday School – ironically (or maybe not so ironically) shortly after he had asked the church to pray for him as he made a decision about whether to continue dialysis. Doctors told him to be in Lexington by 2:30 p.m.
“My biological mother died on Oct. 13, 2015, so I was thinking about that. As I was driving to Lexington, I was thinking, ‘Oh wow, today is mom’s transition day. Is this a good day or a bad day to get a kidney?’” he said with a laugh.
Barnes arrived in Lexington to the news that the kidney donor had not yet died.
“He was on the vent, and they were going to take him off the vent. He was a multi-organ donor, he was 46 years old, and he’d had a heart attack,” Barnes said. “That’s all they could tell me.”
Barnes was also told that, if the donor didn’t die within an hour of being taken off the ventilator, he could lose his chance at receiving the kidney.
“So you’re lying there in your hospital bed waiting for this person to die, and you think, ‘how do I pray?’” Barnes said. “You’re going to be a recipient of a life-changing gift, but then you think about that person and their family somewhere that is suffering. So I just began to pray, ‘Lord, not my will, but thine be done, and give this family peace and comfort, and let him know that I’m going to take care of the gift that he gives to me.’”
Many hours later, a nurse came to Barnes’ room and told him the kidney was on its way.
“I woke up the next morning. … I remember the doctor standing over me saying, ‘congratulations,’” he said.
Barnes recalls that he signed up to be an organ donor as soon as he was old enough to do so.
“It’s kind of ironic that all these years, I said I wanted to be a donor, and I ended up being a recipient,” he said. “I’ve tried to live my life helping others. ‘If I can help somebody as I travel along… my living shall not be in vain.’ That’s a song, by the way.”
Since his transplant surgery, Barnes’ health has progressively improved.
“I’m gaining my strength, and I keep getting good doctor reports,” he said. “I have to travel to Lexington — I was traveling twice a week after my discharge. Now I’m down to once a week, and next week I’ll start every two weeks.”
Since his surgery, a few things have happened which might confirm the theory that organ recipients can sometimes take on characteristics of the individuals who donated the organs.
Barnes, who has loved chicken his entire life, lost the taste for it while he was on dialysis.
“I couldn’t even stand to smell it,” he laughed. “But suddenly, I get this new kidney, and I’m in the hospital, and I said, ‘Wow, where did that come from? I’m thinking I want some chicken!’ So I’ve been eating chicken ever since.”
Barnes also never liked chocolate, but since receiving his new kidney, he’s been craving it.
“It would be interesting to meet this donor’s family,” Barnes said. “I’ve written (them) a letter, and I gave them my information, but I haven’t heard from them yet. I wanted them to know that I appreciate the gift of life that they’ve given me, but I wanted them to also know that, as a pastor and as a Christian, I have been praying for them — for their peace and their comfort.”
And while Barnes is a very spiritual man, he believes he had a bit of a different kind of spiritual experience following his surgery.
“I was in the hospital, and I was praying and thanking the Lord, and I felt a presence in the room,” he recalled. “My son was there, but then when he left, I felt that somebody was still there.”
Barnes said that for about three days following his surgery, he could feel someone’s presence.
“I know the Lord, and I can feel the presence of the Lord, but it was something different,” he said. “I woke up about the third morning, and it was gone, and I just began to speak out and say, ‘Whoever you are, I will take care of this. I will honor your presence and honor the gift that you’ve given me. You can go rest.’”
Barnes believes that his gift of a kidney is part of God’s plan for his life.
“He answered my prayer. He answered my question as to whether or not I should stay on dialysis or whether I should try to receive this kidney,” he said.
He credits God for his healing, but in this season of thankfulness, he also is grateful for his earthly friends who have helped him through his sickness.
Darin Godby and Harold Smith have been instrumental in keeping Trinity Fellowship running smoothly in his absence.
“I haven’t had to do anything, basically, and it’s good to know that a pastor can be sick or incapacitated and people are in place who will step up and take the lead,” Barnes said. “My church family has gone over and beyond to make sure that my family was taken care of and that I had anything I needed.”
He’s also grateful to his employer, Somerset Undertaking owner Alan Stringer.
“Alan has been very supportive,” he said. “He has made sure that I was well taken care of, and that’s a blessing.”
“My wife and my four kids have been very supportive and very helpful in making sure that I was taken care of,” he continued. “Bernice has been a driving force to make sure that everything has been taken care of, and my sons have taken off work to drive me back and forth to Lexington.”
One son, Justin, lives in Shelbyville, Ky., but still takes his turn driving to Somerset, then Lexington, then Somerset again before heading home to Shelbyville, to get his father to his appointments.
“Dr. (Harry) Kennedy has been a tremendous help in my health care,” Barnes said. “He was my adopted mom’s doctor, and she was his babysitter when he was little.”
And Barnes’ sister, Betty Cook, found an interesting way to keep tabs on her brother while he was dealing with his sickness.
“She came (to the funeral home) and met with Alan, and said, ‘I know my brother is sick, and I want to keep a closer eye on him, so I’m going to come help him. … You can pay me if you want to, or I’ll volunteer,’” Barnes laughed. “She’s a great help to me.”
As an organ donor, and now, as an organ recipient, Barnes encourages others to consider signing up to be donors themselves.
“Being a donor is an opportunity to give the gift of life to someone else. People don’t realize how life-saving being a donor can be. And being a living donor allows the recipient, statistically, to have a longer life than (if he or she received) a deceased donor’s organs,” he noted.
Barnes continued to explain that individuals who chose to be living donors can do so either with or without a targeted recipient. And even if the targeted recipient isn’t a match for the living donor, the organ is still used, and the targeted recipient moves up on the transplant list.
He also has a message for people who are on dialysis, waiting for an organ.
“It’s important to do everything that you’re supposed to do,” he stressed. “One of the first questions they asked me was, ‘Have you missed any dialysis days?’ It counts against you if you don’t go every time that you’re supposed to. … So it’s important that you attend all your sessions, that you eat and drink what you’re supposed to, and that you follow their plan that they have for you.”
And just one more thing.
“Don’t give up hope.”
