Innovator and Stabicraft co-founder Paul Adams is paying it forward after getting a lifesaving kidney transplant, from none other than his fiancée Barbara Sutton.
Paul has donated one of the iconic boats for a Trade Me dollar auction, with all proceeds going to Kidney Health NZ.
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For about 22 years, Paul was on medication and being monitored every three months for the kidney disease he had been diagnosed with.
But in the last two years, he began to feel different, he says.
“My last year was a real struggle,” Paul tells Afternoons. “I remember going for a mountain bike ride … 21kms which is not really too arduous on flat terrain in Invercargill, and going home and having to have like 2-2.5 hours’ sleep, so [I was] very low on energy and even using [my] brain in meetings and things like that was quite a struggle.”
His doctor noticed his glomerular filtration rate (GFR) - how much blood the kidney filters each minute – dropped to chronic levels, meaning he would have to find a donor or be put on a dialysis programme until a donor is found.
“What happens if you don’t have a live kidney donor that could support you, then you go on the deceased kidney donor programme, which you go in a kind of a line of people who are on the list.
“That could take up to five years. In those five years, if you’re in the 15 [level of GFR] or below or in the end-chronic kidney situation, you likely would have to go on to a dialysis machine for some of that time or all of that time.
“Dialysis, as many people are on at this point, it’s pretty tough. It’s not a great life for anyone, they’ve got to go two or three times a week and go on the dialysis machine.”
After the doctor laid out the options on the table, Barbara proposed to give him her kidney and Sir Paul says he became emotional.
“The difficult part was more so for Barbara than myself, going through what they call the work-up.
“And the work-up takes a period of six months … they go right into not only your blood match, your health and fitness, but also your psychological wellbeing.
“The question that was posed to Barbara was ‘if you were walking down the street three years down the track and you saw Paul with another woman, how would you feel about your kidney being inside Paul, you know, if he had left you.”
They couple was overwhelmingly relieved when everything went well after the operation because there was so much anxiety, Paul says.
Barbara says she’s often told she did a great thing for her fiancé, but her choice was about them sticking by each other’s side.
“It was always about us together and our future together and it was about our ability to grow old together.”
Having seen first-hand the struggles of kidney disease, Paul says he now wants to give back.
“There’s so many people that have kidney disease that possibly don’t realise they have it and if diagnosed early then you can do a lot more than getting to the end point and then having to worry about kidney replacement.
“We had numerous of our key suppliers all jump onboard and said yes we’ll help with this … the boat package is worth about 62,000.”
The winner of the auction, which closes 27 May, includes a day out fishing with Whitiangler in Whitianga, or a day out on the 1550 Fisher learning the ropes.
