‘Giving my son a kidney didn’t feel like being brave’

Donating adult organs to infants is rare, but it was a risk worth taking for Lee Willocks, writes Luke Mintz

Two-year-old Isaac Willocks rarely listens to a word his mother or father says. Sporting a shock of bright blond hair, he is described as a “wild child” by his parents. “He’s turbocharged,” explains his father Lee. “He’s just full of energy and doesn’t stop for the full 14 hours he’s awake.”

It’s not uncommon for little ones to behave better for one parent than the other, and Isaac is slightly less mischievous when with Lee than he is with Amy, his mother. “I have a certain degree of control over him, he will at least stop and listen to what I’m asking him to do,” explains Lee, 31.

He and his son do, after all, have a unique bond. Isaac was born with underdeveloped kidneys, and seven months ago his father donated one of his own, in a complex and risky operation captured in a gripping BBC documentary shown this week.

In the UK, the donation of an organ from an adult to an infant is rare, as small children usually need organs that are matched to their size. Desperate families are forced to rely on the kindness of strangers, crossing their fingers in hope that, somewhere, a grieving parent makes the agonising decision to donate their dead child’s organs. Last year, 57 families took such a step, facilitating 200 organ transplants. But it is not enough, and in the same year 17 children died while waiting on the transplant register.

The Willocks first discovered Isaac’s condition when Amy was 18 weeks pregnant. After passing their NHS ultrasound with flying colours, the couple – who also have a five-year-old daughter, Poppy – decided to have an extra “4D scan” at a private clinic. Just minutes in, the doctor became worried. Eventually, they were told that a tube running from their baby’s kidneys to his bladder was obstructed, meaning waste was not being filtered

from the blood. He would need an immediate kidney transplant, and without one his life expectancy would be cut by 40 to 60 years.

“Obviously, I was crying my eyes out,” Amy recalls. “They weren’t sure if he’d actually be ‘viable for life’.”

Born by caesarean section at 37 weeks, Isaac was taken to a neonatal unit in Birmingham. He was allowed home and soon began to display his mischievous spark, but he would quickly get out of breath from any

‘I was crying my eyes out. They weren’t sure if he’d actually be “viable for life”’

kind of exertion and needed kidney dialysis three times a week.

His age made the likelihood of finding a donated kidney from a stranger “remarkably slim”, Lee explains. After tests, he and Amy were found to both be a suitable match, and decided that Lee would donate a kidney.

“Isaac was a lot more dependent on Amy at the time because she was with him 24/7,” Lee explains. “It would have been less upheaval as a family for me to be ill as well.”

The operation carried risks, including that Lee’s kidney – twice the length and eight times the volume of Isaac’s – simply would not fit into his tiny body. However, due to the low odds of finding a match through the organ register, they decided to go ahead.

“The risks are all to do with finding the right [blood] vessels, not damaging the things you don’t want to damage,” explains paediatric surgeon Dr Liam Mccarthy, who performed the operation. “Like everything in a small child, they don’t have a huge physiological reserve so you’ve got to do it without making a huge amount of haemorrhage. Complications do occur: roughly speaking in the UK, about 1 in 100 people who have a transplant do not survive.”

In the documentary, Lee’s kidney is removed at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital whilst Isaac, then just 18 months old, is kept in Birmingham Children’s Hospital. Sitting in the waiting room while both her husband and son were under general anaesthetic, Amy says, was tortuous.

The kidney is rushed across town inside an ice pack and wheeled up to Dr Mccarthy. “It’s going to be a tight fit,” he says, looking down at Isaac’s