Man has to choose between possible death or HIV after being offered life-saving kidney from a drug user

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.