AN Irymple lawn bowler has put a torrid few years behind him by taking gold at the Australian Transplant Games, an event which also put his experience into a wider context.
Greg Brown became sick in late 2019 and immediately knew it was polycystic kidney disease, a hereditary condition that saw his mother require dialysis and which claimed the life of his grandfather.
Faced with the situation, wife Lou – a nurse at Mildura Cardiology – put up her hand to donate a kidney.
Expecting her kidney to go onto the donor exchange – the Australian and New Zealand Paired Kidney Exchange program – doctors instead found hers was a sufficient match, and arrangements were made to remove one of Greg’s kidneys in 2021 and replace it with one from Lou’s.
However the COVID-19 pandemic intervened and doctors at Royal Adelaide Hospital, and elsewhere, postponed transplant procedures as long as they could due to the risk to immunosuppressed patients.
Other hurdles emerged, concerns about whether a skin cancer removal Lou had undergone was a risk was eventually deemed safe due it not having been a severe-end type.
As Greg’s kidney capacity wavered between 11 and 13 per cent he continued to work – a mine manager who has worked at Gingko and Snapper, Mindarie and Arumpo Bentonite, and before that at BHP in New Zealand.
“I don’t know how he did it. He just kept putting one foot in front of the other. It was automatic pilot for both of us,” Lou said.
As the kidney capacity slumped to seven per cent, and just one week off from being put on dialysis, the renal transplant team gave the green light for an April 2023 transplant surgery.
Lou went in first, at 8.30am, with the successful removal of a healthy kidney and then Greg went in at noon.
“I was raring to go, I’d had enough, they tested my blood pressure and it never went up,” he said.
Nine hours later he woke up with an assortment of lines connected to his body and nurses conducting an assortment of tests at 15-minute intervals.
But by the next morning the test were out to one-hour intervals, and he finally fell asleep.
“That’s when I woke up and I said ‘geez, I feel good’, and that was about 12 hours since I had been warded,” he said.
“I thought I haven’t felt this good in a long time, as long as I could remember.”
Lou, having had major abdominal surgery, was finally given the all-clear to visit her husband and was similarly impressed.
“I was amazed at how he looked,” he said.
The next few days were trying though, as doctors encouraged the two patients to get up and about, but they pushed through and were able to relocate back to their friends’ home in Adelaide, although they would have to endure daily 7am visits to Royal Adelaide for several weeks.
Fast-forward to October last year, and both recipient and donor had signed up for the transplant games in Canberra, and joined 500 other transplant recipients, living donors, families of cadaver donors and patient supporters at a grand opening ceremony amid the city’s annual Floriade flower and entertainment festival.
“There I learned I got off pretty lightly compared to a lot of people,” Greg said.
“There were kids as young as four. People with multiple organ transplants.
“I was talking to a guy about his kidney, saying my remaining one was 2.3kg and his was like a football, 8kg when a normal one is 400g.”
But it was speaking to the families of cadaver donors that was the most emotional, and inspiring.
“There was a trophy presented for the Spirit of the Games by a lady whose husband was cadaver donor. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the place,” Lou said.
“Over 90 per cent of transplants are from cadaver donors,” Greg added.
While Greg missed out on a medal in the pairs bowling, the former Waikato district, New Zealand, champion of champions took gold in the a competitive singles event while Lou, who was also born in NZ, scored two silvers in the rowing and a gold and bronze in petanque.
But the pair were not really concerned about winning, but celebrating lives post-transplant, and after the games sharing some important messages about transplants.
“If you are a registered organ donor (in the event of death), tell your families,” Greg said.
Lou said don’t be fearful of becoming a living donor.
“It’s obvious to be scared but don’t be scared, it’s amazing. It’s amazing the whole process. The people you put your life’s hands into, they know what they are doing. They do it like we clean our floors. It’s a very routine thing for them to do, but they don’t treat you like that, they treat you like your special.”
The couple have their eye on the next transplant games in Australian in 2026 and may attend the games in Canada this year, and a trip to NZ is planned while Greg will be back to Royal Adelaide every three months but envisions time for “a little bit of bowling”.
