Life-saving gift

Lifestyle – After three years on dialysis when her chances of survival looked very slim, Bernadette Glynn received a kidney transplant in 1979. Thirty-nine years later, the kidney that saved her life is still going strong so she has reason to be grateful as she tells Judy Murphy.

‘The gift of life’ has become such a common phrase to describe organ donation that we can sometimes forget the enormity of what’s involved.  But if you are the person who has received an organ, you know full well that a new life is exactly what it bestows – generally resulting from someone else’s tragic death.

So, Bernadette Glynn’s first and only request when we meet for our interview in Gort’s Lady Gregory Hotel on a Friday morning is that we stress how grateful she is to her donor and donor’s family.

Bernadette, or Bernie as she is known to family and friends, received a kidney back in 1979, after three years on dialysis when her chances of survival looked very slim. Thirty-nine years later, the kidney that saved her life is still going strong so she has reason to be grateful.

Bernadette and her husband Albert had been married for just over a year when she was diagnosed with chronic glomerulonephritis, after months of feeling unwell. She was just 27 years old.

This is a disease in which the kidneys gradually lose function, explains the retired nurse. And in the summer of 1976, her kidneys stopped working.

That was one of the hottest summers on record, but Bernie was so sick, she was constantly cold.

Kilkenny-born Bernie had been working as a nurse in Dublin when she met and married Albert, who’s originally from Ballylee in South Galway.

He’s a vital part of Bernie’s story because when she needed dialysis, they opted to do it at home after consulting with the specialists in Jervis Street Hospital – something that was almost unheard of 42 years ago. It was Albert who converted a room in their house to accommodate the necessary equipment and medical supplies and it was Albert who put the needles in the cannula for the five hours a day, three days a week that Bernie was hooked up to the machine.

For more,  read this week’s Connacht Tribune.