I work in patient transport for the Northwest ambulance service, driving people to and from their hospital appointments. As you’d expect, one part of the job is that I get to know the people I’m driving. Over time I got chatting to a lot of people on their way to dialysis – something I knew absolutely nothing about before this job.
Kidney disease is such an invisible illness, so it’s easy to go through life not thinking about it. Many of the people I drove looked at their dialysis like a job, as something they had to do several times every week for a set number of hours, in order to live. That was how they got their heads around it and got through it. Hearing them describe how dialysis actually affected them and the negatives that came with living on dialysis, really made me realise that’s it not just the cure to kidney disease that you might think it is.
The Covid-19 pandemic was really hard for them too, as many of them were immunosuppressed. One day I’d go to pick someone up to take them to their appointment, only to find out they’d lost their life. I had really built a bond with them and got to know them. It was heartbreaking. It made me realise I really wanted to donate a kidney to help them. If I had it inside me to give them this gift, meaning they wouldn’t need to live on dialysis for the rest of their lives, then why not give it a go?
I saw a post from a friend on Facebook about how he had donated a kidney in Manchester. At this point I knew I wanted to donate but had no idea what was involved, so I reached out with him and asked about the process. He was really honest about how he had suffered quite badly during the recovery process and recommended I do all the reading I could to make sure it was something I wanted to do.
I remember looking online for more information. I got the phone number for the renal team at my local hospital, so left them a voicemail to say I was interested in finding out more and things went on from there.
The long journey to donation
I went to meet the team at the Royal Liverpool Hospital and spoke with a transplant coordinator called Ann. She gave a really good breakdown of everything involved and what donating a kidney would actually involve from start to finish. After that, I knew it was something I really wanted to do.
It was a long process, longer than I had expected. There were a lot of appointments and a lot of my own time I had to put in. I didn’t get any priority because of my job with the NHS, so at times was running on very little sleep during my night shifts. It felt frustrating when the appointments overran or I needed to repeat any tests for whatever reason, but I knew that I was helping someone in a far worse position than I was by doing it.
After the tests began, I started telling my family members and close friends about it. To be honest, they all thought I was nuts. They kept asking, what if my kids needed a kidney in the future? I said to them – what if they don’t? That’s way more likely, and it’d mean we’ve missed an opportunity to help someone like the people I drive to dialysis every day. I didn’t want to look back in 10 years when my kids were grown and healthy and wish I had donated when I had the chance. Maybe things would change in the future, but right now I’m fit and well, our family has no history of health conditions, I keep really fit. I was in the best position to do this. In the end I told them it was my decision, I had thought it all through and it was something I knew I had to do.
In the end all the tests came back fine, but even then we had to wait months for the transplant date to be arranged. Even the day before the surgery was scheduled to happen, I had to wait at home for a hospital bed to become available. It wasn’t until 9:00 at night that I finally was told one was ready and I could go in.
