Adam and I have been very close friends ever since college at the University of Oregon from 1996-2000. We are both passionate golfers, so it was shocking to hear that Adam felt too sick to play all his rounds at our favorite golf destination, Bandon Dunes, back in Nov of 2016. Upon returning home, he went to the doctor as he had been feeling really crappy for a while and couldn’t shake it off.
He would soon discover that his life would never be the same. He suffered from a rare autoimmune disease that silently destroyed both his kidneys to the point of total failure, and he immediately needed to begin dialysis. He opted for peritoneal dialysis as it would allow him a higher level of freedom, and he was able to more or less get by for a while waiting on the transplant list.
It was about 8 months after his diagnosis that my wife and I had our 4th child, so we had our hands full with all that. As time went on, I would see Adam about once a year as I live in Denver and he lives in Portland, and with that amount of time passing between seeing him, I could see very clearly how his health was slowly but steadily deteriorating.
In September of 2019, we spoke on the phone to catch up, and he told me he was having to quit his job as physically he couldn’t do it anymore. He was getting worse. The best way I can describe what happened next was that God just put in on my heart that I needed to do something, that this was my calling. I brought it up to my wife on her father’s birthday, who was a saint in his own right and had passed away from kidney cancer 6 years prior, and she was immediately supportive of the idea.
I started the process soon after to see if I was a viable donor. Beyond all that, I of course wanted to find out whether we were a match. There were stops and starts throughout the process and by mid-December I finally had the news that I was healthy enough to be a donor and that we were match as good as siblings. I broke down crying, and on March 9, 2020, the transplant was successfully completed.
It was a huge success, and Adam is convinced he got the better of my two kidneys as his numbers from his blood tests have been excellent. It truly has been one of the most amazing blessings of my life, and I’m happy to report that after about 7 weeks post-surgery I was back out on the golf course playing just about as well as I was pre-surgery. Since then, as of this writing in August 2020, I have won two golf tournaments and a long drive prize at a tournament, so I haven’t skipped a beat. Next week Adam and I will be returning to Bandon Dunes to share a special week together at the place where it all started.
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