Back to the Beginning....

My eldest brother was diagnosed with Kidney Disease back in 2008, IgA Nephropathy to be exact and it’s fair to say he's been pretty complacent about it, or at least not been giving it much consideration apart from his routine hospital check ups. If he doesn’t think about it, it’s not really happening!!

Well, things have deteriorated pretty dramatically, and in August last year he was faced with what he pretended was never going to happen. A Kidney Transplant! And or Dialysis!

He almost certainly wants to avoid dialysis, and therefore is looking into something called a “Pre-emptive transplant” this means having a Living Donor give him a gift of a Kidney (everyone has 2).

As of October last year, all of the potential donors that had come forward including my other Brother and I were not a blood-group match for my eldest brother. So we are all going into a 'paired-donor scheme', where they try to cross-match from incompatible pairs, so for example, my kidney would go to the brother of another couple, whose sister would donate her kidney to my brother. The database run is performed every three months. 

 If a suitable donor didn't come out of this then another option is for a more specialised procedure where one of us does donate to my brother and they try to remove the antibodies that he has against our blood group. The kidney unit are currently in contact with Guys Hospital in london to get some statistics on this to see if it is a viable option.

On the surface my brother looks alright, you wouldn't know he was so sick to look at him, so it's hard to get my head around the FACT that he needs this drastic treatment.