Stop thinking and start doing.That’s the advice 32-year-old Mudgee man Mark Konemann is offering to anyone who has ever considered donating or receiving an organ – and a small, faint pink scar below his belly button may be the only giveaway that he is speaking from personal experience.
Six years after he was diagnosed with renal failure, Mark underwent a kidney transplant in a rare procedure known as a simultaneous organ swap.
The procedure involved five organ receiver-donor pairs - including Mark and his father, Neil - in simultaneous operations as far away as Melbourne and Western Australia.
Before the operation, Mark had been on kidney dialysis for five years.
“I was living a normal life for years, but when I started deteriorating, everything changed,” he said.
“I stopped work and I stopped socialising – I was always tired and depressed, and my life revolved around watching the clock for my dialysis treatment.”
Knowing that a kidney transplant was now a necessity to improve his son’s condition, Mark’s father, Neil, raised his hand.
“He was willing and able – we had the same blood type, and I was always set to have a normal swap,” he said.
“But when we found out that my antibodies would turn on dad’s kidney and make the swap a fail, that’s when we started looking into the pair exchange.”
In a program that began in NSW just this year, Mark - the receiver - and Neil - the donor - joined four other receiver-donor pairs as far away as Melbourne and Western Australia to take part in a simultaneous organ swap operation.
The process is a complicated one involving months of preparation, a major part of which is finding the matching pairs in the first place given all participants must meet several strict medical criteria, including having the same blood type.
During a pair exchange, multiple surgeries take place around the country where each donor donates a kidney to the receiver in another pair in the same 24 hours as each receiver gains a kidney from the donor in another couple.
As a result, Neil’s kidney was sent to the receiver in Perth, while Mark was gifted a new kidney from a donor at Westmead Hospital – making the Konemanns only the second pair to take part in such an exchange in the history of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
Mark and Neil do not know their respective organ partners, and Mark said he hoped to keep it that way, conscious that he “just wouldn’t know what to say” if he did.
“The fact that someone was willing to donate an organ in the first place is deserving of a big thank you in itself, but for a young fellow somewhere out there who is a stranger to me to do that – it’s just such a generous gift that he didn’t have to give,” he said.
After 14 weeks of regular hospital checkups, Mark is home in Mudgee “achieving more in a week than I previously would have in a whole year”, working on his general fitness, catching up with friends and planning a return to work early next year.
Now he’s calling for the law which allows parents to override the wishes of their child regarding organ donation as written on their driver’s license to be abolished.
“As far as I see it, donating is that person’s choice and their choice alone, and if you are old enough to have a license, you are old enough to make a decision on whether it’s right for you,” he said.
“I understand that a parent might change their mind when they see their child deceased, but they need to know that by allowing organ donation they are saving another person’s child.”
Mark believes he has been given “a second chance within a second chance” – a second chance at life, found within a fallback organ donation option that wouldn’t have been possible without the agreement of all pairs involved.
“I have met some people who have been on dialysis for some 14 years because they didn’t want to use their child’s organs, but no-one else who matched their situation had come along,” he said.
“I urge anyone who is willing and able to donate to sign up and do it, and to anyone who needs a donation, take what you can while it is available to you knowing that if you don’t, it could be a very long time before you are living a healthy life again.
“Either way, don’t wait.”
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