“I’ve had kidney problems since I was born. In my lifetime, I had about 30 different operations to restructure my urological system and eventually had chronic kidney disease. Finally, I had some emergency surgery on my intestinal area and my kidneys failed completely. I woke up on dialysis and spent about 11 months on it before they found me a kidney.
“Now I’ve got a new spirit. They said I came out of surgery with a smile on my face, and it had been a long time for that. I feel like I’ve just gotten a new life. They placed my kidney on the left side of my stomach, so I have a bulge in the middle of my belly. It’s kind of funny to point to it and go, ‘here it is right here.’ My wife and I named it ‘Sweet Baby James’ after the James Taylor song.
“My donor, William Driver, is a guy in his 30s who was listening to a podcast on effective ways of giving in life. He heard about the UAB Kidney Chain and said, ‘I can do this.’ Here’s a man who is married with three kids, and he just called up randomly and offered his kidney. Lucky for me. I am awestruck by all of this and incredibly grateful for his sacrifice.
“Because of where they placed the kidney, they also had to get some blood vessels from another donor, a young man who died. They used those blood vessels to tie the kidney to the bladder. So, in essence I have two donors, and I often think about that young man as well and what he did to help me continue living. All of this is miraculous to me.
“When I was a baby, it was the doctors in Birmingham who didn’t know how to fix me, so they sent me to Boston, and a lot of my surgeries were done at Massachusetts General Hospital. Later I lived in North Carolina and went to school at Duke University. It was there that talk started about a transplant, and they said, ‘If you do need a transplant, we want to send you to UAB in Birmingham.’ I thought, ‘Wow, that’s where I came from,’ and how remarkable it would be to go back there to get help.
‘It is incredible to see how far Birmingham has come and how great a hospital UAB has become. It is wonderful, and I would recommend it to anybody who needs a transplant of any kind. I’m truly grateful it is here.
“I am a Methodist minister, though I had to go on medical leave when I went on dialysis. One day I plan on getting back into the pulpit and ministering to a congregation again thanks to the really down-to-earth, caring, loving individuals who make up the UAB team. I would truly call it the hand of God at work in my life.”