When Mike Shepherdson had a life-saving kidney transplant at the age of 13, the expectation was that, at best, it would work for a couple of years.
Yet Mike is now 64 and his kidney – still healthy and fully functioning more than 50 years later – is one of the oldest transplanted kidneys in the UK.
What makes it so remarkable is that when Mike received the transplant, in 1974, many donated kidneys didn’t even last 12 months. They now last longer due to better anti-rejection medication, but still rarely work for more than 15 to 20 years.
‘Yet Mike’s kidney is still going strong and there is no evidence of it failing. We expect it to keep on going,’ says renal consultant Richard Baker, who has been treating Mike at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds for the past 22 years. ‘The question now is will it outlive him?’
So how has Mike’s donor kidney lasted so long?
Mike needed a new kidney as aged ten he developed glomerulonephritis, a kidney disease caused by a bacterial infection that damages the tiny tubules in the kidney, meaning that they can’t filter blood.
From the age of 11 he needed dialysis, which performs the job of the kidneys by removing impurities from the blood, cleaning it and returning it to the body.
Mike Shepherdson with his mother in hospital at the time of his transplant. He is one of the longest-surviving kidney transplant patients in the UK
The family’s three-bedroom home had to be adapted to house the bulky dialysis equipment which took up most of the second bedroom.
‘My mum Dorothy and I trained to do my dialysis at home with just our own scribbled notes for guidance – we even had to have a telephone line installed in case we needed help,’ said Mike, who now lives in Brotherton, North Yorkshire, with wife Frances, 65, a retired underwriter.
The machines ‘took five hours to set up’, he recalls. The dialysis itself took ten hours a session, ‘which I had to do three times a week’.
He adds: ‘My childhood was dramatically disrupted. I missed all of the first year of my secondary school because of having dialysis treatment and part of my second year, too, because I felt too ill on the days I wasn’t doing the treatment.’
Aged only 12, Mike was put on the transplant list. It was on July 4, 1974, that the call came to say a suitable kidney had been found.
Mike only knows that the donor came from France and the kidney was flown to the Leeds hospital for transplant.
‘I didn’t know anything about the donor, other than they were most likely a young person who had died from a head injury, most likely a road traffic accident,’ he says.
Mr Baker says doctors have always assumed Mike’s kidney came from a healthy young donor – which partly explains how long it’s lasted: ‘it was in top condition from the start.’
It was unusual to receive a donor kidney from overseas at the time (there were no computers and doctors were reliant on paper systems and phone calls) but donor kidneys were generally ‘better quality’ then than now, adds Mr Baker.
Mike’s grandparents pictured with the front page of the Yorkshire Evening Press that featured news of his transplant
‘They tended to come from younger, more healthy donors who had died because there were no safety belts in use in cars, so many more people – including younger people – died in road accidents.’
By contrast, organ donors are now often older – ‘kidneys started to deteriorate after the age of 40, and there’s more chance of the donor having suffered from conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, which affects the quality of the kidney’.
Although commonplace now, when Mike had his surgery, in the 1970s, kidney transplants were rare and he was the youngest patient that the transplant team at St James’s University Hospital had ever operated on.
Surgeons still use the same technique for kidney transplants as they did then – plumbing the main blood vessels of the transplanted kidney into veins at the top of the leg and groin, says Mr Baker – but the outlook for those who need the operation has dramatically improved.
Whereas back in the 1970s fewer than half survived beyond a year, according to the latest data between 90 to 95 per cent of recipients now live beyond a year.
‘The standard of anaesthetics has improved, operating theatres are more sterile than they used to be, and surgeons have better tools and equipment to carry out the transplant,’ says Mr Baker.
Around 3,000 kidney transplants are carried out each year in the UK and around 5,000 people are on the waiting list for one.
Mike Shepherdson pictured now, aged 64 – more than 50 years after his kidney transplant
Mike was on the list for around 18 months before a new kidney was found for him. After the operation, it took about a week before Mike fully felt the benefits.
‘I suddenly had more energy, less fatigue and was weeing more consistently,’ he says. ‘I hadn’t peed by myself for two years – the dialysis machine had done it all and I’d been restricted to drinking a pint of fluid a day.’
He stayed in hospital for two weeks – buoyed by daily visits from his mum who came in on the bus from York, while his dad came from work in the evening.
‘The kidney was slow to start working, which wasn’t uncommon back then as the anti-rejection medicines weren’t as good as they are now,’ says Mike.
He was warned the kidney might not even last a year – ‘five if I was very lucky’ – and another would definitely be needed by the time he was 21.
There have only been a handful of cases in the UK where a transplanted kidney has lasted longer than 50 years. These include Sue Westhead, 76, who had a kidney, donated to her by her mother in 1973 when Sue was 25 and her mum 57, which has survived well over 100 years – something Sue previously attributed to ‘my mother and her genes’.
After having a kidney transplant, patients have regular blood and urine tests to measure levels of creatinine – a waste product formed by the digestion of protein in food, which is filtered out of the blood by the kidneys. These levels are used to assess healthy kidney function (higher levels can indicate the kidneys are struggling).
Mike continues to have these tests every three months.
Mike washing up in a basin at the hospital at the time of his kidney transplant
‘Patients with kidney transplants are more prone to infections, vascular disease and some cancers due to the anti-rejection drugs,’ explained Mr Baker. ‘So they have to be monitored carefully and have their kidney function checked regularly. The immune-suppressant drugs they take to help the body not reject the organ reduces the effectiveness of their own immune system and makes them more likely to develop tumours and other problems.’
Mike still takes the same anti-rejection medication he was originally given, although the dose increased when he became an adult.
‘My doctors aren’t going to change them because they have worked well for me for so long,’ he says.
‘I’ve only ever had a couple of issues with my kidney. Five weeks after the transplant I had an episode of rejection. Luckily I was still in hospital so it was fixed with a high dose of steroids. Then I had a heart attack and a subsequent quadruple bypass aged 59 and my kidney function dipped. But luckily the function bounced back within 24 hours which was quite incredible, as it could have easily gone the other way.’
As a teenager and young man, he didn’t talk about his donated kidney, saying: ‘I felt there was a stigma attached and wanted to feel normal with colleagues and peers.’
As he got older, Mike says he feared his kidney might wear out. Since Covid, he’s anxious about very crowded places in winter ‘like the local pub on Christmas Eve’ in case he picks up an infection.
The fact that Mike has taken such steps has helped the kidney, says Mr Baker.
‘The reasons Mike’s kidney transplant has been so successful is that he takes his medications at the proper dose and is very good at taking them when he should. He also stays relatively fit, and he’s not a heavy smoker or drinker. He’s looked after himself really well. It doesn’t guarantee longevity in a transplant but it can help.’
He adds: ‘There is no evidence at all that his kidney is failing, and we expect it to keep on going. It’s remarkable, as the average survival rate for a kidney from a deceased donor is 14 years, and 20 years from a live donor. So Mike’s kidney has more than trebled its expected survival rate.’
As a young adult Mike wanted to get on with his life and not dwell on his transplant, so he took no steps to contact the donor’s family. ‘I wanted to be thought of as normal, not as a kidney patient,’ he says.
By his 40s his curiosity about the age and sex of his donor and how they died grew, but he has come to accept he’ll never know (the records would no longer exist by now).
However, he now has the original record of surgery from St James’s University Hospital – a brief paragraph with a summary of the operation and how it went.
‘It was given to me by the hospital to celebrate 50 years of my transplant and it’s a lovely keepsake.’
He remains grateful that the operation gave him the chance to lead a fulfilling and healthy life – he went on to hold an executive position for tech giant IBM, and he and Frances have been married for 37 years. They had two children, Tom, 36, and Emily, 32, and a granddaughter Ruby, two.
‘I’ve lived my life to the full,’ says Mike. ‘More than anything, after the transplant I just wanted my life to be normal. My kidney was an incredible gift, and because of it I’ve been able to live a wonderful life, with a great career. I’ve travelled all around the world.’
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