SEAN DELANEY An advocate and a transplant recipient
When Sean Delaney arrived at the University of Alberta hospital during the summer of 1999, he didn’t expect his visit to the emergency room to lead to a decades-long partnership in research and advocacy.
It was less than a year after he’d received a pre-emptive kidney transplant from his brother at age 28 and he was suffering from a condition no one could yet diagnose.
But Dr. Sandra Cockfield, who was on rounds that evening, called in colleagues from multiple departments and was able to come up with a correct diagnosis — a rare form of non-hodgkin’s lymphoma — and care for his kidneys.
“She’s quietly been one of my own personal heroes, just for being exactly the right person at the right time,” said Delaney, now 48.
Since that night, Cockfield has gone on to publish work on Delaney as his transplant doctor, in the hopes it could help patients with similar medical challenges.
Delaney, in turn, is also working to assist others who face transplants across the country. Now the associate director of organ listing and allocation at Canadian Blood Services, Delaney works to streamline organ donation across the country and create new ways to help people receive the organs they need to live and thrive.
This has included the creation of a national registry to administer new programs such as the Kidney Paired Donation Program, which has facilitated more than 700 transplants since its founding in 2009.
“What it meant is a whole new way to obtain an organ transplant, if you had a living donor that was unable to donate to you,” he said.
Another program, begun in 2015, facilitates kidney sharing Canada-wide for 567 patients who have high antibody counts — a condition that increases the difficulty of a match being found for these individuals, such as Delaney himself.
“It was a very high-need group that was not going to get transplanted on local lists alone,” said Delaney, noting the program allocates existing transplants. “They needed access to a full national donor pool to make it work.”
Delaney’s medical journey is far from over. His kidney has been in failure within the last year and he went back on peritoneal dialysis over the August long weekend.
Now, Delaney is back on the transplant list — including the hepatitis C-positive list — and utilizing social media to locate potential donors. He has found about 25 so far, but it has made him keenly aware of how important it is for organ donation to become the norm rather than the exception in Canada.
“Ultimately, you need patient advocacy and donor campaigns to save lives,” said Delaney.
Beginning the transplant process again has been challenging, he said. Most of his colleagues are used to seeing him as an advocate, not a patient. But he finds reward and strength in combining those roles in his work.
“You can’t get into too many topics where there isn’t some sort of a relationship back to your own personal experience,” he said. “You are definitely impacting patients that look a whole lot like you.”