WOMAN DONATES KIDNEY, SAVES CHAT-ROOM PAL'S LIFE.

Byline: Karen Maeshiro Staff Writer

When Denise Agenter and Kathy Szewick met online a year ago in an Internet chat room for cat lovers, they immediately became fast friends.

Now, they have something more in common than a fondness for felines.

Agenter, a 1989 honor graduate of Palmdale High School, recently donated a kidney to Szewick, who was on dialysis after a kidney donated by her brother failed.

``I love her. I felt that bond,'' said Agenter, 29, who had never met Szewick face to face before offering her kidney. ``I know the Lord sent her to me and this was something I should do. By medical terms it should have never happened.''

Szewick now considers Agenter part of her family.

``I felt from the very beginning that she was sent my way, by fate or God-sent,'' said Szewick, who like Agenter lives in Washington state. ``There's no way you can ever imagine how to begin to thank somebody like that. She gave me a new life.''

Agenter - whose maiden name is Lindau and who has two sons, ages 8 and 9 - first encountered Szewick in a cat chat room in March 1999. Both were new to computers and entered the chat room about the same time.

Agenter, who runs a day-care center out of her home in Vancouver, Wash., initially talked about her calico and her gray tabby, while Szewick, a 44-year-old maternity ward nurse in Tacoma, shared news of her boyfriend and Himalayan cat.

``We formed a bond instantly,'' Agenter said. ``When we started talking we had more in common than everyone else. Even though she's 44, she acts like she's in her 20s. She's young at heart.''

Agenter said she found out that Szewick suffered from degenerative kidney disease quite by accident in May 1999, when she popped into the chat room and Szewick was conversing with someone else about it and explaining how she was feeling.

``Then she let me know she had a terminal illness. That just crushed me, that this person who I had formed a bond with was terminally ill,'' Agenter said. ``For the next two nights, all I could do was think about her, that she could die, basically.''

Suffering from kidney failure, Szewick received an organ transplant from her brother when she was 19. That kidney failed recently, and Szewick had been on dialysis, four to five hours nightly, three times a week.

Agenter contracted hepatitis as a teen-ager - she got it baby-sitting a friend's foster children - so never dreamed she could donate a kidney. Nevertheless, she asked Szewick about the possibility.

``I said, 'How do we find out if we are compatible?' That kind of scared her. I didn't talk to her for three days,'' Agenter said. Then, Szewick e-mailed back and gave her a toll-free number to call.

Szewick said she was initially standoffish because of negative stories about the Internet and people who pretend to be someone they are not.

``How do you know if this person is real?'' Szewick recalled thinking. ``The more I thought about it, I felt it can't be that bad of an idea. What if we are a match?''

Agenter received information from the Kidney Foundation, then went to a local hospital for tests.

``They took seven tubes of blood. I'm so afraid of needles, it was a major thing for me,'' Agenter said.

The results arrived last September, when experts told Agenter that she was not only compatible with Szewick, but showed no trace of hepatitis.

The two women, in the meantime, had met face to face in the waiting room of a local hospital, where Agenter was visiting a friend who had gone into labor.

``It was like we had known each other the whole time. There was no awkwardness. We hugged each other like old-time friends,'' Agenter said.

The women met two other times - Agenter visiting Szewick in Tacoma in October, and then Szewick and her boyfriend visiting the Agenters in December.

The operation was initially set for January, then rescheduled for Feb. 14. But Szewick got sick two days before Valentine's Day, and the surgery was postponed again, Agenter said.

The four-hour transplant took place April 24, the day after Easter, at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle.

Both women are doing fine now, although Agenter is still experiencing some pain where doctors pinched a nerve.

``I would never take it back. I would do it again if I had to,'' Agenter said.

Agenter's and Szewick's story has been covered by Washington media, and the women are scheduled to appear Thursday on CBS' ``The Early Show'' to discuss their experience.

``I want everybody to know this can be done,'' Agenter said. ``People can donate and keep other people alive. I saved her life.

``Sure I'm in a little bit of pain but it's not any worse than childbirth was,'' Agenter said. ``It can be done on a daily basis, and lives can be saved.''

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(color) Kathy Szewick, then on dialysis, recently received a kidney from online friend and fellow cat lover Denise Agenter, left.