York's Jen Muston All the Way Back After Kidney Transplant

Jen Muston isn’t afraid of a challenge.  

You can see it by glancing at the York College women’s lacrosse schedule she lines up each spring as the school’s head coach.

The Spartans, a consistent force in the NCAA Division III ranks, annually play top-tier teams such as Franklin & Marshall, Gettysburg, Salisbury and Washington and Lee as part of their nonconference slate.

“She lives for our out-of-conference schedule,” senior defender Nesiah Bertram said. “She does a really good job of making us rise up to the challenge.”

On-field challenges are one thing.

Invisible challenges are another.

That’s what Muston faced for several years with very few people knowing about it.

A former conference player of the year at UMBC, Muston took over as the head coach at York in 2008 but commuted from her home in Maryland until relocating to Pennsylvania in 2017. Part of the transition included finding a new primary care physician. Muston brought her medical records up and her new doctor didn’t like what she saw.

“She said, ‘Those numbers don’t match up with your age and your body makeup. I want you to get this looked at,’” Muston said.

Routine bloodwork led to visiting a specialist and then back to Maryland to consult with doctors at Johns Hopkins. They discovered that Muston had stage four chronic kidney disease and that her kidneys were only functioning at about 30-percent capacity.

She had no obvious symptoms — other than increased fatigue — and there wasn’t much she could do at the time.

“Just leading a healthy lifestyle,” Muston said. “Some medications, just really controlling blood pressure and watching my diet because certain things can affect your kidneys.”

For the first few years, the only people who knew about her condition were her husband, Pat — also a former UMBC lacrosse player — and their parents.

Muston knew she would eventually need a transplant, but her kidneys were functioning well enough that she wasn’t eligible to receive one. Symptoms usually start when kidney function declines to 20 percent or less, at which point a person can join the national waiting list. It was a bit of an agonizing waiting game.

“You just sit and wait,” Muston said. “When you have that hanging over your head, it’s the most amount of stress I’ve ever experienced in my life. You just try to deal with it.”

“As a competitor and as a problem solver, you want to go and attack something,” Pat Muston said. “You want to say, ‘Hey this is the problem. Let’s put everything on the table and let's fix this.’”

But the Mustons could not do that. As much as possible, they tried to live their lives normally.

“We took it serious, but at the same time it really wasn't at the forefront,” Pat Muston said. “It was always kind of in the background. The numbers keep going down and down and down. Then it gets more real.

“The talk got more serious. There were times we would just be sitting there and I would look over to see my wife start crying out of nowhere, like something would trigger something. She's always been an extremely strong person on every front. If she complains that something hurts or that something's bothering her or she cries about something, it’s some next-level stuff.”

By 2022, roughly five years after being diagnosed, Muston knew she was getting closer to being eligible for a transplant. Her kidney function had fallen into the 20s. There was still a lot of unknown, but there was one thing she could control.

“I signed up for a gym membership and started going because I knew that I wanted to be in the best physical shape as possible,” she said. “Everybody said that if you’re in good shape, the recovery will go a lot faster. I worked out four to five days a week for two years. I was exhausted and had nothing to give.”

A bout of COVID toward the end of 2022 sent Muston’s function below the 20-percent threshold and allowed her to be placed on the kidney transplant list.

The only cure was a new kidney. According to the National Kidney Foundation, of the 123,000 Americans currently waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant, more than 101,000 need a new kidney. Only 17,000 people receive one each year.

The clock started ticking because Muston desperately wanted to avoid dialysis — a treatment that removes waste and excess fluid from the blood when the kidneys are no longer functioning properly — and the impact that would have on her lifestyle.

That’s when she opened up about the struggle she and her family had been facing privately for five years. She had a strong preference to receive a kidney from a living donor due to higher long-term success rates. For that to happen, people needed to get tested to see if they could be a match for her.

“Once it all started to get to the point where we were in the red zone, for lack of a better term, that's when Jen made the conscious decision that she had to cast her net out, open up and get the word out,” Pat Muston said. “Otherwise, if you keep it to yourself, then it's very hard to find support. Ultimately it was her decision, like everything else in life she takes on. She just opened it up to the world.”

The response blew her away.

“I’ve never experienced human kindness and selflessness in that way,” Jen Muston said. “From family members, friends, but even strangers. People emailing or reaching out saying ‘I’ll do it. I’ll get tested. What do I do? How do I do it?’ And I just couldn’t believe that.”

In some ways that was the easy part. More waiting ensued. People were tested, but it was often months before she’d find out any information about potential matches. Some information was unavailable due to privacy laws.

“You have to just sit back and wait,” she said. “That seems counterproductive to my personality and wanting to fight for something. I’m sitting there going, ‘How can I fight for myself here?’ There were a lot of low points of feeling helpless, not knowing how I can help myself, not knowing how to navigate the system.”

Everything changed late one Friday night this past February. York had its first scrimmage the next day. Some neighbors were over watching a movie and her husband had gone up to bed early. Muston had her phone silenced and face down while watching the movie and missed a call from the transplant center saying they had a kidney available from a deceased donor.

They called Pat next, and he was half asleep, but noticed his phone light up. What came next was instant scrambling.

“Basically, when you get that call, you have 15 minutes to take the kidney or not because they’re calling other people and lining other people up in case the first, second or third person doesn’t take the offering,” Jen Muston said. “There’s a rating system where they match your kidneys and this was a six out of a six, which is like a unicorn. A six out of six on a deceased kidney match is basically like getting a living donor match.”

Muston called her doctor to get his opinion before making the decision.

“Jen and I were just sitting there on pins and needles pacing back and forth in our kitchen,” Pat Muston said. “He called back and he couldn't tell us to do it, obviously, but he just kept saying this was a really good opportunity. I wasn't going to tell Jen yes or no or you should do it or you shouldn't. But Jen’s tough as nails. She just said, ‘Let's do it.’

“As soon as she said that, it was game time.”

Muston was at Hopkins the next morning at 7 a.m. awaiting her transplant, instead of hopping on the bus for the first scrimmage of the season.

Everything went according to plan.

“The doctors came in and just instilled such confidence,” Pat Muston said. “I was keeping everybody informed. I had a text chain of probably 35 people that once every hour and a half or two hours I would keep updated. It was the best and worst day of my life.”

As soon as it was over, Muston was ready to get back to her life, and her York team. The players decorated her house when she got discharged from the hospital. They brought her foods she wasn’t allowed to eat before, including potato chips. The parents and team members sent her messages and her assistant coaches stepped up in a big way to fill every void.

But she wanted to be a part of it all.

“Stepping away from lacrosse was not in her plans and it’s never in her plans,” Pat Muston said. “That’s what she does. She gives her heart and soul to that team and those girls. She couldn’t wait to get back.”

“I was on my computer watching film in the hospital,” Jen Muston said as she laughed. “And then as I soon as I got home, the first thing I did was start scheduling film with the players one-on-one because I wasn’t at practice.”

About a week post-transplant, Muston’s husband drove her to the field so that she could watch practice from their car. She needed to get back to her team.

“They told me to wait until the middle of May,” she said. “I basically waited until the middle of March. I only missed four or five games. There was no way I was waiting until the NCAA tournament. I had to be cautious. Infections are detrimental and could be catastrophic. You’re very sensitive to an infection in those first six months and then also in the first year. But the first three months is extremely critical because you’re on so much medication. Your immune system is pared down to nothing.”

Muston drove separately to York’s road games. She double-masked anytime she was near the players and stayed distanced as much as possible. Meetings and scouting sessions were done via Zoom and not in person.

“During her recovery, she tried to have like a lot of grit and fight to get back as soon as she could because she wanted to be here for us,” Bertram said. “That's what she loves to do. She doesn't have kids and she said, ‘You guys are my kids. Coming here and seeing you every day is the best part of my day.’”

York’s 2024 season was another successful one. The Spartans went 14-7, highlighted by an 11-game winning streak late in the season, and won the MAC Commonwealth title for the third year in a row. They won an NCAA tournament game before falling to Wesleyan in the second round.

Katie Owens, a 2017 York graduate finishing a residency following pharmacy school, was at the NCAA tournament game to cheer on her former team and offer support for her coach who had undergone so much.

“Knowing what a transplant entails, specifically from the pharmacy side of it, and what she was going to go through before, during and after the transplant was hard to swallow,” Owens said. “Knowing somebody that you love and care about has such a long journey ahead of them, you just hope everything goes to plan.”

Muston’s body continues to heal, which has her extra excited for the 2025 season.

“If feels awesome because this is the first time in many years that I haven’t had something hanging over my head in the background,” she said. “This is the best I’ve felt in years. I feel energized.”

Muston’s teams have won 222 games in her 17 seasons, reaching the NCAA tournament 11 times and advancing to the quarterfinals five times. She will keep pushing her players, and the program, forward.

“She is one of those people that has tough love. I experienced that my freshman year,” Bertram said. “Sometimes that's needed because without a little bit of that, you're not really going to allow your players to break outside of their shell and push to their full potential. She just has a lot of passion for the sport, and she definitely wants to help us all grow to be the best version of ourselves, not only as players, but also as individuals.”

“I was reflecting a little bit and thinking about how hard it must be to coach young women at this developmental age,” Owens said. “They're emotional. They're going through a lot figuring out their career after school. Allowing us to feel all the feels but also to train like a championship team was tremendous. She was definitely tough, but you just always knew how much she cared about you, and she let it shine through in many moments throughout practice, games and life.”

Muston will share her wisdom with a new perspective after this experience and the support she received.

“How can I be selfless to someone else?” she said. “Am I? Maybe I’m not and I need to do a better job. This was very humbling. I’m very thankful and blessed that as this was happening, I really saw the human spirit in those times. There are so many good people out there.”