A tale of two kidneys
When an altruistic kidney donor swooped in to save his mate, Timaru man Richard Spackman decided to pay it forward.
Alport Syndrome, a genetic condition affecting kidney function, eyesight and hearing, runs in the family of his friend and fellow Timaruvian Jim Scott. Scott’s sister had a kidney transplant the same day he had a biopsy on his kidneys. His mum is on dialysis and one of his daughters has been diagnosed with the condition.
For more than a decade, Scott watched his kidney function drop down, and felt it too.
‘‘I started to run out of puff. I couldn’t walk from our office to the bank and back.
‘‘I used to come home from work at lunchtime, sit on the couch and go to sleep. Wake up, go back to work, come home and be asleep again before tea.’’
Eventually the Timaru man needed dialysis.
It was at this point, one of his poker mates, Richard Spackman swooped in. The 39-year-old visited Scott a couple of times when he was up in Christchurch training to use his dialysis machine.
‘‘I felt for him,’’ Spackman said.
‘‘You recognise with dialysis just how much it limits your life.’’
He thought at first, he wouldn’t be able
to help his friend since they were different blood types, but after a conversation with a liver-transplant recipient, he realised advances in anti-rejection medication meant blood types weren’t the be-all and end-all in terms of matching donors and recipients.
‘‘It was just nagging away. I came back and decided that I need to see if I can be a donor. You can’t let a guy go through something like that,’’ he said.
He fixed it in his mind – at their next regular poker game, he’d pull Scott aside and let him know he was going to donate. But Scott beat him to the punch.
‘‘On Saturday the 25th of August, at 9.30 in the morning, my nephrologist rang me to say that they had a kidney for me,’’ Scott said.
It wasn’t Spackman, it was an altruistic donor. Someone who’d never met Scott, had never heard of him, but had put themselves forward to donate.
‘‘Jim walked in that day and he almost had tears in his eyes when he walked in. He sat down and said ‘guys, I’ve got some amazing news, I got a phone call from Christchurch Hospital and I have a donor’,’’ Spackman said.
Scott got his new kidney on October 1, 2018. He’s talked to his donor through the transplant co-ordinators, sending letters and has been able to live life to the fullest – even travelling to Europe earlier this year.
But Spackman kept thinking donation through.
‘‘It was bothering me, the fact that someone would do that for him, someone who doesn’t know him. I’d gotten my head around the idea of donating a kidney and for all the right reasons to help someone out and to help a mate out.
‘‘But I thought there’d be someone else’s mate who still needs one and if someone’s good enough to do it for [Scott], I should probably pay it forward.’’
So he kept going with his tests. As an altruistic donor, he had to initiate every step. On September 30 this year, he donated his kidney to a stranger.
‘‘I just couldn’t get my head around the other side that somewhere, someone’s life has changed and they’re getting back to doing normal stuff again.’’
Both of them wanted to use their experiences to raise awareness around donation. Scott was planning on being a deceased donor, most likely donating tissue such as skin.
‘‘I’m sure people don’t think about it enough. The community is more aware than it was, but we still don’t have enough donors,’’ he said.