Tony Gartside
A man rushed
to hospital for a kidney transplant has spoken of the dilemma he faced after
learning the donor organ could be infected with HIV.
Tony
Gartside had waited four years for a donor organ before he finally got the call
to say a kidney and pancreas had become available.
The
transplant window was so small that after putting the phone down at 3am, he was
rushed from his home in Plymouth to Oxford for the operation.
But upon
arriving, he was told that the organs had come from the victim of a drugs
overdose - and it would be two weeks before tests revealed if they were HIV
free.
Mr Gartside,
40, was born with type 1 diabetes, and his kidneys began to fail by the time he
was 32.
He said:
'They showed me into a room and told me the donor organs had come from a death
by drug overdose and asked if I still wanted to go ahead.
'Because the
person died by drug overdose, they wouldn't know whether the donor had HIV for
two weeks.
'It was a
scary process having to say yes or no after sitting in the back of an ambulance
for hours.
'I thought:
"Do I risk it and say yes, or do I say no and wait another 18 months, or
even longer?"
'In the end,
I went ahead with it.'
The kidney
transplant surgery took 10 hours and left Mr Gartside with 32 staples in his
stomach.
After the
surgery, he was sick for days, unable to even stand up straight, and was
concerned about the risk of HIV.
Two weeks
later the HIV results came back - and were, to his relief, negative.
He has since
made a full recovery.
Mr Gartside
said: 'My diabetes has completely changed - it's amazing - and even that
doesn't describe how good I feel.
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