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Steve's Story
People always tell me I read the paper too much! Well I guess if I didn’t read the paper this eventful day then I wouldn’t be sitting here telling my story!
I was reading
the Sunday Times in
March 2003 when I came across this article regarding a lady who needed
a kidney
transplant, to be honest I looked at the heading and didn’t worry
about reading
the rest, I went straight to the sports pages on the back. After
getting my
daily fix of my weekly sport I returned to the start of the paper,
again
breezing past this article, which took up most of the page. I
turned the page
to be confronted with a little ad, saying”Your Kidney
Wanted”. I thought this
was odd but read the advert anyway; it’s at that moment I went
back to the
story on the other page and read the whole article. I read this
article 4
times.
From the moment I sent the email I knew I would be the one donating my kidney. From there the long process began finding out if I was a match and to make sure my brain was on the same page as my body. I met Gail early on in the proceedings; I think if I hadn’t met her I would never have gone through with this. I visited her at dialysis and saw how much not only herself but what everyone with kidney disease has to endure.
It took nearly
a year for all the
testing and paper work to be completed and in February 2004 we
underwent the
surgery at Royal Perth Hospital. I must admit that the months
prior to this I
was getting a little edgy. Not because I wasn’t sure
if I wanted to go ahead,
but the amount of time it was taking. Not once throughout the
entire time did
I ever feel that I could not go ahead with it.
The morning of the operation was quite a whirlwind with last minute interviews with “Today Tonight” and the “Sunday Times”. I went into surgery about 8am on the Monday and the only thing I remember actually inside the theatre was telling my surgeon I didn’t like his taste in music! I got back to my room at approximately 3pm and don’t remember much from the next 2 days. I was released from hospital on the Thursday but was again readmitted that night with an infection in my urinary tract.
Since this
operation a lot of
people ask me why I did this. My only answer so far to these
questions is, because
I can!
I still see
Gail on a regular
basis and to see how much her life has changed it gives me great
satisfaction
in what I have done.
It has now been
a year since I
donated my kidney to Gail. My life is back to normal on all
accounts. I
restarted work 2 weeks after the operation and went back to sport 6
weeks after
that. I have had no ill affects since. I recently got
engaged to my wonderful
partner who through all of this has been a tremendous support, and we
are
expecting our first child in April 2005.
I get asked a
lot
about why there
was so much media attention. Believe me if it was solely up to me
all
of it
wouldn’t have taken place, but I agreed because it was a good way
to
get
peoples attention towards Organ Donation. Also this was the first
time
in Perth a Living stranger to stranger altruistic kidney transplant has
been performed.
(Well so I have been told)
I have also been asked how much money I got from this! As I say to them, this procedure cost me money not made me money.
