“I had IGA glomerulonephritis, which, of all the kidney diseases, affects only a small amount of people. That kind of kidney disease has a slow failure. Usually you have about 10 years before the kidneys fail and you have to go on dialysis. With most of the other kidney diseases, you have about two years before you have to go on dialysis.
“It was around 2002-03 when I found out about my disease. I was a healthy person otherwise, and the doctors thought I could probably get a transplant before going on dialysis. I immediately went to UAB in 2004 to get on the list so when the time came that I needed a kidney, I’d be able to get one.
“I moved up close to the top of the list by about 2009, and then my insurance changed, and I had to go to a different hospital in Tennessee. I transferred my waiting time on the kidney list up there, and I was immediately at the top of their list. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of months before they had a kidney for me. Unfortunately, after the transplant, the kidney immediately failed. It never worked. And at the time, my old kidneys were still creating urine, it was just the creatinine part that was not working right. They didn’t realize the kidney wasn’t creating urine on the first day. I wound up going through a painful weekend, and when they did an ultrasound on Monday, they found out that the kidney had grown three times its size and had a blood clot in it.
“They rushed me to emergency surgery and told my wife it was serious — serious to the point that I could die from it. So, they took the kidney out.
“Fortunately, I wound up not going on dialysis immediately. Shortly after this, I retired and my insurance changed again, and my primary care doctor told me I needed to come back to UAB. I said, ‘I know.’ And I came back to UAB in 2010 or 2011. They thought I’d be back to the top of the list again pretty quick.
“But when I started sending my blood samples to UAB, they told me I had a problem. They said my PRA, or antibody count, was 99. I said, ‘What’s that?’ They said, ‘You’re body is creating antibodies so you’re kidney won’t match up with 99 percent of the people in the world.’ They told me that was caused by my first transplant. My body created antibodies and then I also had two blood transfusions. They told me they don’t normally transplant people with an antibody count above 30, and here I am at 99. They told me it could be five to six years before I could have another transplant. I was kind of stunned by that.
“They told me I needed a living donor transplant the next time, too. When they told me that, my wife thought she might be able to donate the kidney. She got evaluated in 2011, but she had a blood pressure problem and they knocked her off the list pretty quickly.
“That was when I went out and talked to friends here in town about needing a kidney. I had about five people say they would give me a kidney. Derek Lambert was one of them, and Mike Cooper was the other. These two guys said they would do whatever they could to help. They sent UAB their blood samples and were told they both could give a kidney, but that they didn’t match up with me. That’s when they told us about the paired program.
“They asked Derek and Mike if they wanted to stay on the program, and they said yes.
“I went on dialysis in 2011, and I was doing very, very good. My doctor said I was doing so good that he wasn’t sure a kidney transplant would improve my situation at that time. I was happy. I thought I could live the rest of my life doing this because I was doing so well.
“Then, I met with Derek in New Orleans in December 2013 after he graduated from seminary. He started talking to me about the transplant and said, ‘Hey, I haven’t heard from UAB in two or three years. Are you still on this program and are you going to need a transplant, or should I just forget about it at this point and move on?” I told him to forget about it and move on because I wasn’t ever going to be able to match up with anybody. I was a one percenter. And I felt so well that I didn’t even want a transplant at the time.
“Well, about a week or two after seeing Derek, he called me and said, ‘Hey dude, I got a call from UAB saying I need to come in for an evaluation.’ Then I got a call from UAB shortly after that saying they thought they found me a kidney. I said, ‘How in the world can that be?’ Then they told me they had a new program and I needed to come back over for an evaluation.
“I met with Dr. Jayme Locke in March. She explained everything to me about the program and told me I’d have to come over about 10 days before the surgery to have plasmapheresis.
“I asked her, ‘Why do I want to go through all of this again? I almost died from the first one. And I’m doing well on the peritoneal dialysis. Why should I do this?’ She told me the peritoneal dialysis wouldn’t last forever. She said, ‘Down the road you’re going to have infections and problems, and you’re not going to last forever on that.’ She told me the kidney she found was a good enough match that if I took care of myself, it could last until I was 90. She convinced me right then.
“When she met me, Dr. Locke told me my name had been on her bulletin board for two and a half years because I had been her toughest patient. She said, ‘I’ve looked at your name every day because we haven’t been able to come up with a match for you.’ She told me she had one now, that she was going to personally do my surgery and that she thought I was going to do very well. I told her, ‘OK, sign me up.’
“I knew my surgery would be sometime in May, and I came back home. Then I got a call from her saying they wanted to do it April 11, and I thought I’d have to be there 10 days before that to do plasmapheresis. But she said, ‘No. This is a perfect match. You don’t even have to go through plasmapheresis.’ I said, ‘Wow. That’s got to be like one in a million.’ She told me, ‘This is like you standing at half court of a championship basketball game and someone hands you a ball and tells you to throw it over your head and if you make it you win.’ She said, ‘You just dunked it.’ She told me this is a very unusual and rare situation. To me, that’s a miracle.
“Of course, I came over for the transplant, and everything went fine.
“Once I got home from the hospital, though, I started getting sick. My joints and bones started hurting real bad, and I had to go back into the hospital. I had an allergic reaction to some of the antibiotics and it caused my antibody count to go sky high.
“Dr. Locke told me she was going to have to do a biopsy because she thought the antibodies had damaged my kidneys. She wanted to see how much damage was done, and she said I was going to have to start plasmapheresis.
“They did the biopsy and I kept bleeding inside afterwards. Dr. Locke noticed what was happening and she jumped on top of me with all of her weight and pushed down hard with her fingers for 30 minutes to stop the bleeding. When I went to ultrasound after that, they discovered there was a blood clot sitting on my kidney. She told me they’d check the biopsy to see what kind of damage is done, and she said I was not going to be able to start plasmapheresis either because I’d bleed to death.
“She started me on IVIG (intravenous immunoglobulin) instead. And then, when she came back, she said the biopsy showed there was no damage to my kidney. None. She couldn’t believe it. She said the Lord must have been on my side because she’d never seen that before. It’s like there was a shield around my kidney.
“After five days of IVIG, I got ready to come home, and my antibody count was zero, which was amazing.
“Since then, I’ve been doing very well. All of my blood numbers are very good, and my creatinine numbers are good. Everything is great.
“I can’t thank those folks who wanted to give on my behalf — Mike and Derek — enough. Mike was rejected as a donor because of some previous surgeries than he had. And Derek, he hadn’t been my pastor for about three years, but we were still good friends. We went to his graduation in New Orleans. I knew he’d keep his word. I never doubted that with Derek.
“A lot of people look at him and say, ‘Wow. Here’s somebody who had no skin in the game giving a kidney to somebody.’ But that’s the kind of person Derek is.”
Michael Little - 14
“When she met me, Dr. Locke told me my name had been on her bulletin board for two and a half years because I had been her toughest patient."