Expect to wait four years for a kidney transplant, and in the meantime you’ll be connected to two needles three times a week, two hours per session.

This was a diagnosis Katherine Granado was not willing to accept.

“Doctors had always told my parents a doomsday thing…, but I always defied it,” the DVC student said.

Granado, now 30, was born with spina bifida, only one kidney and hydrocephalus, which caused her height to remain at 4 feet 2 inches.

A student worker here since 2001, she is a familiar figure behind the cash register in the cafeteria and the receptionist’s desk in the Student Union Building. She also served three terms as secretary to the Associated Students of DVC before losing in the elections this month. She is one of the three original proposers of an on-campus health center.

On a recent afternoon, Granado talked about how she defied the doomsday predictions once again, thanks to her father.

Frequent urinary tract infections had caused bacteria to eat away at her kidney, reducing its function to 10 percent.

By 2005, she was put on the transplant list at UC Medical Center in San Francisco and told not to expect a kidney until 2009.

Her only hope of getting off dialysis before then was to find a kidney donor herself, which is difficult to do. Even between parents and their children, a match is rare.

When her father learned she would need a transplant, “he immediately jumped up and said, ‘What do I need to do?'” Granado said, smiling through misty eyes.

Had her father, Raymond Moreno, not been an almost perfect match, Granado believes she would still be on dialysis.

Now that she has a healthy kidney, her blood work is done every other week and a more intense test conducted each month on an off-week. But the doctor visits will be cut back May 8 to once every couple of months and eventually to fewer than that.

Granado hopes to transfer in the fall, but said it will be difficult to leave the students and her co-workers. “I’ll miss how it seems DVC itself is like a family,” she said.

After a Sept. 21, 2007, article about her impending surgery was printed in The Inquirer, Granado said, “People – many I didn’t even know – told me they were praying for me. Many have kidney disease. It’s a growing thing, but it’s still difficult to talk about.”

This “outpour of love” from family, friends, co-workers and even strangers helped her through dialysis.

“Co-workers called weekly or even daily to see how I was doing,” Granado said, tearing up.

After the surgery on May 8, 2008, doctors told her it would take four to five months before she could return to DVC.

But Granado came back at the start of the fall 2008 semester, again defying the odds.