He’s 88 — and the kidney he gave is still going strong
NICHOLAS CRACE, 88, a retired charity boss from Southampton, made history in 2012 when he became the oldest living donor in the UK, giving a kidney to a complete stranger, 72-year-old Veronica Reynolds, a former office manager from Sheffield. She is married with two children, Matthew, 49, and Mark, 47.
NICHOLAS SAYS: I decided out of the blue one day that I wanted to donate a kidney to someone who needed it. I was getting older and wanted to do something useful with my life while I still could.
My wife had died six months previously and we had no children. I was sitting in the garden with a cup of tea, thinking how lucky I was that I had such good health, when the idea popped into my head. I had never carried a donor card, though I do now.
To become an altruistic donor, I first had to complete various tests, which took about nine months — there was no problem with me being older.
After passing blood tests, fitness tests on a treadmill and kidney filtration tests, as well as a 40-minute counselling session with a psychiatrist, finally I was told that a match had been found.
I wasn’t nervous, even though I knew it was major surgery and there was a one-in-3,000 chance of dying. I had no idea who was getting my kidney, except that it was someone in the North.
Veronica wrote a letter to me a few months later. It was lovely to hear from her and to know she was doing so well.
I sent her a Christmas card back, then one day she phoned me. It was a complete surprise — but a lovely one. S
he and her husband came down to see me the following week and stayed all day. We talked for ages and we still meet up a couple of times a year, and send emails regularly.
It’s lovely to have a friendship with her. I don’t feel that I’ve done anything marvellous but it is
satisfying seeing Veronica so full of life. It feels like a job well done.
VERONICA SAYS: Nicholas’s kidney has completely changed my life. I reached the point where I felt I would never get a transplant — and I knew there was a risk I would become too ill to have one.
I needed a new kidney because I have an inherited condition that causes cysts to grow on them, which stopped them doing their job properly.
My mother died of the condition in 1982 and I miscarried a baby because of it a year later — that’s when it was diagnosed, when I was 38.
Doctors told me then that one
day I would need a transplant. I was on dialysis for eight years — where a machine does the kidneys’ job of cleaning the body’s blood — before I went on the transplant list, and I would scream when the needles went in.
Dialysis is exhausting and I had to go four times a week for several hours at a time, though I tried to get on with things.
You do start to despair, though — none of my family was a match for me and, sadly, my two sons have the same kidney problems anyway. When the hospital called to say they had a match, I was in complete disbelief.
After the operation, I wrote a thank-you letter and the hospital passed it on. I sent Nicholas two letters a year via the hospital — and he wrote back, but I never knew exactly who he was. I’d guessed from his letters that he was older, though, as he wrote with a fountain pen.
Eventually, one Christmas card he sent me had the name of a hospice on the back, one of which he happened to be a patron of, and I guessed he had some link to it.
I managed to trace him through that, then one morning I phoned him. He was amazed to hear from me — but I didn’t want to shock him too much because he was 83 at the time!
His kidney is still going strong — it’s been six years now since the transplant.
We get on famously and when I visit, he treats me like I live upstairs in Downton Abbey and won’t let me do a thing; he treats me like a queen! He’s such a gentleman.