Arati

In 2012, around January-February, I lost about 12 kilos of weight inexplicably – no given reason, no symptoms – wasn’t feeling unwell, just generally losing weight. Tried to book a GP appointment, but if there’s nothing really wrong with you, you don’t really get an appointment immediately, so I said OK that’s not convenient, I’ll come back, blah, blah, blah. Ended up going to Pune, India, where my parents live, on holiday, for my Mum’s 60th and my Grandmother’s 90th birthdays. My Dad said, ‘Obviously you’ve lost too much weight, let’s do a blood test now, don't wait till you go back.’ Did a blood test and it came back and half my report was flagged in bold with various things. So, obviously, we didn’t know what to make of it, so my Dad took it to one of his diagnostician friends at the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune – my Dad’s a retired army officer – and he didn’t even look at the results, he just looked at my face and told me my kidneys had failed. So he said, I can tell from your face, from your skin colour, that your kidneys are gone.

I mean, in fact, on the day that I was diagnosed my Dad asked, ‘What can we do, how can we fix this?’ And the answer was either dialysis or a transplant. And he said, ‘I’ll get tested.’ Straight away. Within 20 minutes, we had decided that I was going to get a transplant from my Dad, if he was a match. Fortunately, things worked out really well, I was extremely lucky. I was told afterwards that if I had got back on a flight I might not have made it to the other end. Because my haemoglobin was so low that I would just have died on the flight.

So, I went to India for a holiday for ten days and I never came back for nine months.

It felt strange to have Dad’s kidney because it’s having something strange in your body and that you’re taking medication to sort of keep it in there. Kind of nice at the same time, because I know he’ll always be with me. But it doesn’t feel any different than my own regular body. But it was great because a) it was the love for me that made him give me the kidney, and 2) he says, because I went there and stayed there for 9 months, he kind of sees it as a rebirth – it’s like Mum gave birth to me, but he kind of gave me a second life. That’s how he put it. Like I said, within a minute of the doctor saying a transplant is the option, he said, ‘I’ll give you my kidney’. There was no question of it being anybody else, or any doubt, or any hesitation whatsoever. And afterwards when people said, ‘Oh you were so brave to give your daughter your kidney’, it’s like he was ‘It’s my daughter, why wouldn’t I?’