‘On Friday the 13th I gave a kidney to save my friend’s life’
Johnny McCarthy’s tortured history and life lessons struck a chord with Niamh O’Flanagan and she ended up saving him, writes Donal Lynch
NEXT week marks a special anniversary for old friends Niamh O’Flanagan and Johnny McCarthy. It marks five years since she donated a kidney to him, saving his life. The operations took place side-by-side on Friday the 13th, 2015. “It might be unlucky for some,” Niamh says, smiling. “But it was lucky for us.”
Niamh and Johnny met when she was a schoolgirl and he was travelling around schools giving talks about the lessons he had learned in his storied life, which took in drugs, alcohol and God. Johnny had emigrated from Galway to America as a teenager and in his time in New York he worked in construction and became an alcoholic. “I had days and days of binges, I don’t really remember a lot of it. Your head would be gone, wrecked. I’d be borrowing clothes and shoes. I was making $700 or $800 a week but all the money was going on booze. I would be shaky. Sometimes it would be worse than others. Sometimes I’d disappear for days. I had blackouts.”
He periodically left America and travelled the world — he worked for a while in Spain and Britain — but he says alcohol caused a kind of inertia in his life. “The drink meant that you’d get stuck in places,” he explains. “You’d be in a pub but you couldn’t make it out of there. You might have a date waiting for you in the next pub but you’d find yourself stuck. My relationships suffered, they wouldn’t know if I’d be dead or alive at the end of the day.”
Eventually, in his twenties, he got into a programme of recovery, but while he managed to abstain from alcohol, other addictive patterns were emerging. “I took up karate and cocaine,” he says smiling, as though one were as natural as the other. “I found myself going downhill again. Cocaine made me paranoid. I knew from smoking weed that I was prone to that anyway.”
On one particularly bad day he went into a church in Manhattan and prayed to Padre Pio to get him back into the programme of recovery. His prayers were answered and he returned to Ireland, went back to agricultural college and started working on the family farm. His recovery continued and he began giving talks in schools about the lessons he had learned. He gave one of these talks in a school where Niamh was a student. His words struck a chord with her.
“I had been quite a wild teenager,” she explains. “I had had to leave one school and had a history of being a bit wild. It was quite a confused time in my life and his words just gave me clarity. I became friends with him.”
Niamh would go on to meet her future ex-husband through Johnny. “(Johnny) used to visit us every now and again and we always got on great,” she recalls. “To me Johnny was part of the family.”
So much so that when ill health struck Johnny a few years later Niamh felt a keen sense of responsibility. “My kidney troubles started when I was around 46,” he says. “They were nothing to do with addiction issues. My whole body swelled up, there was fluid all over my body. I was in hospital for a year. I had a near-death experience in Galway.”
When Niamh saw Johnny periodically during this time she would ask him what his blood type was, with view to offering him a kidney. Johnny was initially hesitant to accept her offer — he demurred to find out his blood type. But, as he became gravely ill, he knew he had no choice. He gave Niamh the goahead to contact the hospital.
“I got in touch with Beaumont and told them I’d like to go forward to donate a kidney,” Niamh explains. “They asked if we were related and when I said no, they said, well you have to give us a lot of documented proof to show that you are not being coerced into this. I was able to show them pictures of us from holidays and we explained the connection. They tested me and they found out that I was healthy and suitable to donate. They sent all my information to a kidney-matching system in Coventry — and they came back eventually to say we’re going to put your kidney into Johnny.”
By then Johnny was gravely ill and his skin had taken on a yellow hue. There was a complication, too. In the meantime Niamh’s marriage had broken down. “(The organ donation) was the worst timing ever,” she recalls. “I was working full-time, trying to juggle everything, trying to juggle the kids and get used to the fact that I was now a single mother. So I asked (the medical team) to put it off until the spring.”
Niamh faced scepticism from some around her. “I’m sure some people thought I was a bit mad,” she says. “People said to me, what about the risk of something going wrong? Or another thing I heard was: what if your own children end up needing a kidney?” She explains that the offer had its roots in the death of her father, more than a decade ago. “I was 23 and my father was 55. We played in a brass band in Boyle, Co Roscommon and he just dropped dead of a heart attack. Since then I’ve lived life as if every day could be your last. It was the most life-changing thing that ever happened to me.”
The professor in charge of the procedure told Johnny that getting a donor kidney was “like winning the Lottery”. He and Niamh decided to test their luck by having the operation on Friday the 13th. “I think they had had a cancellation because someone else didn’t want to have it on that date,” Niamh recalls. “We decided not to let that bother us. They operated on us at the same time in rooms that were beside each other. I thought of it as kind of like a plumbing job. They took the left one, because it has a longer lead. They left (Johnny’s) own kidneys in.”
The operation was a success and Johnny’s health started to improve almost immediately. For Niamh the pain in recovery was slightly worse than she had anticipated. “They pump you with air and I could feel pain in my shoulder blades and armpits. It was fairly strong but I have quite a high pain threshold.”
So high indeed that just a few days later she was back on her feet and travelling to pick up her children.
Now, five years later, Niamh and Johnny remain firm friends. He continues to gives talks in schools and she is now a schoolteacher. She has also found love again; her partner is renowned theatre director Patrick Sutton.
Awareness has increased in recent years around issues to do with kidney transplants; the singer and actress Selena Gomez is among the celebrities who have received a kidney donations from a friend. Niamh says raising this awareness is part of the reason that she and Johnny are telling their story. While he will be on medication, which ensures his body will not reject the donor organ, for the rest of his life, he has benefited hugely from the transplant. “We’re five years on and, touch wood, it’s really gone well,” Niamh says. “We just want to let people know that this kind of thing is possible. Live organs are the Rolls Royce of organ donations, and they can really help someone in need.”
‘Some people said to me, what if your children end up needing a kidney?’