> Interestingly she mentioned she was told to take some strong medicine after the transplant. She got this feeling it wasn't good for her and stopped taking them soon after, without telling the docs of course.
Typically, after a kidney transplant, patients are instructed to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives. This is to reduce the risk of the patient's body rejecting the transplanted organ. Your family member was just straight up lucky that her body didn't reject the organ, even without any immunosuppression.
One thing that's fascinating to me is that most immunosuppressant drugs used today hadn't yet been discovered in the early 60s! AFAIK, all they would have had was prednisone, prednisolone, and azathioprine. Back then, a kidney transplant aided by these drugs would have been as new and revolutionary as the Hepatitis C cure or the triple-drug therapy for cystic fibrosis is today.
> Your family member was just straight up lucky
That was my thought as well when she told me. Then again, when given just a few years perhaps one considers these things a bit differently. The side effects for the drugs you listed does indeed not sound like a lot of fun.
Oh yeah, they suck. Long-term effects of just prednisone can include everything from muscle weakness to reduced bone density to spontaneously developing diabetes. Generally, doctors prescribe these kinds of drugs for longer than a couple months only in situations where the risks of not taking them are worse than the many, many side effects of taking them long-term.