My big sister gave me her kidney and saved my life. She’s my hero
In an astonishing act of kindness, barrister Denise Waldron gave brother Raymo the most precious gift of all
FOR Denise Waldron, giving away one of her kidneys to her younger brother was a ‘no brainer’ — she had watched Raymond O’Brien grow steadily sicker as his own kidneys started to fail him.
By the spring of 2017 the father of three young children, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was 20 years old, was no longer able to get out of bed before lunchtime each day and doctors finally confirmed what the family already knew was coming — Raymo as he is known to his family was at end-stage renal failure and would have to start dialysis.
He was barely home from the hospital appointment when all three of his siblings, Denise, Dave and Paul, had rung to offer him a kidney.
‘We discussed it among ourselves,’ explains Denise. ‘We always figured that if Raymo didn’t get a deceased donor we’d look at the family, so it didn’t come out of the blue. So Raymo never approached us, we just told him that we were there for him, with whatever he needed.’
Dave was tested first to see if he was a match, but it was Denise who proved to be the best candidate, scoring ten out of ten for compatibility.
Once the results were in, the Galway barrister and mother of two set to work making sure she would be as fit as possible for the transplant surgery. There were daily yoga sessions, hundreds of miles walked and early morning sea swims to prepare her mind and body for the task ahead.
It was only when lying in a bed being wheeled down to theatre at Beaumont
‘It’s hard to express the gratitude that I have’
Hospital in Dublin that Denise finally realised just how scared she was at the prospect of going under the knife for the first time in her life.
‘I had never had surgery before, I’d never been under a general anaesthetic before, so I was kind of terrified,’ she says.
Thankfully for Denise and in that strange way that kismet works sometimes, her brother Dave, who is a neurosurgeon at Beaumont, was operating on someone that same morning in the theatre next to the one where Denise and Raymond’s surgery was taking place.
‘There are about ten theatres in Beaumont but Dave just happened to be in the one next door to mine,’ says Denise. ‘I was trying not to let anyone know that I was terrified, but I said it to Dave.
‘So next thing I know, just as I was being put under, Dave came into me, he was all gowned up and he actually held my hand while they were counting down. It was so lovely, he helped me on my way.’
Offering to be a live kidney donor must be one of the most altruistic things one person can do for another. While modern medicine is truly an astounding thing, and surgeries like these are becoming more common, it is still a major undertaking.
But as Raymo and his family know, the rewards can be life-changing.
‘Denise is my hero, she is my life saviour,’ he says simply.
‘That a perfectly healthy woman would go into a theatre and get this done for you, she has to be very special. It’s hard to explain or express the gratitude that I have to my big sister for giving me a new lease of life.’
For Denise, the experience was not only a chance to help her little brother, it also refreshed her own perspective on life and health.
‘I learned that I have rude health, which is not always a given and is something I’d always taken for granted,’ she explains. ‘But I don’t any more. They test you rigorously to make sure you’re healthy enough to go for surgery. You’re put through every kind of health test and I’d never had an MOT before.
‘When I was thinking of donating I joined one of the kidney donation support groups, and the amount of people who failed those tests really made me think. I haven’t deserved to be as healthy as I am, I do take better care of myself now.
‘You realise how lucky you are and looking at Raymond and how he was... when someone in your family is that sick and heading towards dialysis it’s very tough to watch. He had no energy, nothing. And growing up he was always full of life and so healthy.’
The O’Brien family are originally from Salthill in Galway. Three of the siblings, Denise, Raymo and Paul still live there, with their parents, Pauline and Raymond, now based in an apartment on the same road as Raymo and his family. Dave lives with his family in Dublin, where he works in Beaumont Hospital.
At the age of 20 and about to qualify as a carpenter, Raymo was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1987.
‘You just get on with it,’ he says. ‘But after about 10 years you can develop complications — with me it was my eyesight. I went through a lot of laser treatment that didn’t work.
‘But in the last couple of years I’ve had two cataract operations and can see perfectly now because they put in new lenses.’
In 2002 he was diagnosed with renal failure and told he could expect to go on dialysis within a few years. However, he managed to hold on to his kidney for the next 15 years.
‘He really minded himself,’ explains his wife Ethna. ‘He did everything he was told to and more, he took his blood pressure daily and any fluctuation at all, his meds were changed accordingly (with the consent of his doctors).’
In the meantime the couple decided to start their family, they now have Isabel, 10 and eight-yearold twins Harry and Amy.
‘Initially we were told to hold off, so we did for a while,’ says Raymo. ‘But then it was a case of, none of us is getting any younger, either we do it now or it’s not going to happen.’
As the children got older, Raymo’s health began to decline.
‘It got to the point where even the kids could see it,’ says Ethna. ‘He’d have to take a lot of rests. Towards the end I’d give him breakfast in bed and he’d stay there till it was time to get up for lunch.’
Raymo says they all knew renal failure was coming. ‘My bloods were getting worse and we were meeting professors every three months up in Dublin, waiting for them to tell us I needed to go on dialysis,’ he adds.
Thanks to his family, however, Raymo was spared the invasive and time consuming treatment that replicates the function of the
‘It got to the point where the kids could see it’
kidneys, removing waste products and excess fluid from the blood.
Denise is the eldest of the O’Brien siblings, and has two daughters of her own, Hilary and Laura.
‘Of course I spoke to them about it all,’ she says. ‘I’m divorced but we’re still very good friends, he was very supportive of my decision and the girls could see how ill Raymo was.
‘For people thinking of live donation, it’s very important to know how rigorously you get tested. The medical team want to be absolutely sure you are healthy enough to donate. I explained it to my daughters; look, these guys in Beaumont, they won’t let me give my kidney to Raymo if I’m not healthy. Obviously surgery is not risk-free, but people don’t praise the team up in Beaumont enough for all that they do. There’s this big team of doctors and nurses who are testing you, physically and psychologically, they need to make sure you won’t regret it.
The surgery was scheduled for August 2017, a time suited to Denise’s summer break from the courts, when she could take several weeks off to recover. Denise was brought down first, where she underwent keyhole surgery to have her kidney removed.
After that some time was spent getting her kidney ready to transplant into Raymo. The entire procedure took almost a full day.
‘The surgeons were amazing,’ says Denise. ‘Mr Gordon Smyth removed my kidney and Ms Dilly Little transplanted the kidney into Raymo.’
‘The minute I woke up I felt immediately better,’ says Raymo. ‘I was up and out of bed in no time. Because Denise’s operation was keyhole, where they fill you up with gas and move your organs out of the way to get the one they want, it takes a while for the gas to get out of your system. So her recovery time took a while longer.’
Because Raymo has always been very conscious of his condition, making sure to follow the strict diabetes and renal diets recommended by his medical team, he bounced back surprisingly fast.
‘He was literally walking down the corridor within a couple of days,’ says Ethna. ‘The hospital staff said they’d never seen anything like it. And he took no pain relief, not even paracetamol, it’s very unusual. They took the morphine off him after a day because he wasn’t using it.
‘It was tougher for Denise but she’s flying it now. All she wanted to do was get back into the sea, she goes swimming every day, and sure enough, she was back in the water after two months. Again, that was amazingly fast.’
Perhaps the most unusual outcome, however, was how for several days Raymo was affected by the hormones that remained in Denise’s kidney.
‘That was pretty funny,’ laughs Denise. ‘At the time of the operation I was going through the menopause and some of my menopausal hormones remained on the donating kidney which had a strange effect on Raymo.
‘I went in to see him in his room a couple of days after the surgery and he was kicking off the blankets saying; “I don’t know what’s wrong, I’m sweating here.” Raymo is usually a really cold creature. So I mentioned it to one of the doctors, and he said: “Oh yeah, the hormones were still in your kidney, it would take a couple of days to get flushed out of his system.”
‘For a few weeks after the operation he was getting hot flushes and kicking off the blankets as he was overheating at night. Ethna and I found this hilarious. We still joke that he’s now more in touch with his feminine side and has a better understanding of what women have to go through.’
Denise’s pre-operation routine of yoga, sea swimming and walking meant she was in great condition, which helped her recover.
‘I was pretty good after three weeks and that’s a very fast recovery,’ she says. ‘I do think being physically healthy beforehand really helped. I was also very lucky that I went to stay with Dave and his wife Marie for a few days before returning to Galway.
‘Marie is a nurse, and she really minded me. The first thing she did was get me out walking, which is very important, it definitely helped speed up the whole recovery thing, and it was like I had my own personal nurse.’
As well as helping to turn Raymo’s life around, the experience has also brought the entire family closer together.
‘We were all close anyway but it did bring us even closer together,’ says Denise. ‘It was really tough on my parents to have their two children going in for surgery on the same day, but they are so thrilled and happy to see Raymond in good health now.
‘Especially with his children being so young, they’re such an amazingly tight unit, and now they can do so much more together.’
Now on anti-rejection medication, which means he has a compromised immune system, Raymo recently received his first does of Covid19 vaccine.
‘It’s brilliant, such a relief for us as we’ve been so careful about cocooning for so long,’ says Ethna. ‘I know the Irish Kidney Association
‘We have been so careful about cocooning’
did a lot of work around that, to get transplant patients pushed them up the list.’
But it is Denise they will always be grateful to for her incredible generosity.
‘The kids were just five and six when the surgery happened,’ says Ethna. ‘And we were advised to just tell them that Daddy had gone to Dublin to get more energy. But when he got back they instantly noticed the massive difference in him, how he was up doing stuff with them. Isabelle actually said, “Daddy isn’t in bed until lunchtime any more.”
‘We told them only last month about the transplant and how it worked. They ran into school, telling them all how “my auntie saved my daddy’s life”. They know how special she is.’
Denise is quick to brush off the praise. ‘Raymo would have done the same thing for me at the drop of a hat,’ she says. ‘It was a no brainer, that myself or Dave or Paul would give him a kidney. It just happened to be me.
‘The only thing I found really surprising about it all was that I didn’t know until afterwards that they didn’t take out Raymo’s kidney, they just popped mine in with his, so now he has three — which seems a little greedy to me!’ O
THE Irish Kidney Association’s Organ Donor Awareness Week comes to an end today. Supporters are asked to carry an organ donor card, include Code 115 on their driver’s licence or download the digital organ donor card APP on their phone. Visit ika.ie for more information