Selfless high school teacher donates kidney to save student with fatal disease
A teacher selflessly donated one of their kidneys to help save one of his students so they wouldn't have to go on dialysis.
Teacher Eddie McCarthy, 35, had been watching TV when he saw one of his high school maths students, Roman McCormick, and his parents in an appeal to find the teenager a live kidney donor.
Roman had stage-4 kidney disease and had no relatives that were a donor match. His kidneys were failing and without a donor, he would have to end up on dialysis. Mr McCarthy was a dad himself and when he saw Roman's mum's desperate plea he decided to test to see if he was a potential match.
McCarthy, who works as a teacher at Whitmer Senior High School in Toledo, Ohio, told the Washington Post: "I didn’t realise he’d been going through something this serious.” Dialysis treatment takes five hours, three days a week and can have very uncomfortable side effects. It also would mean Roman would have to go onto the deceased donor waiting list along with the 92,000 people also waiting for a new kidney.
Roman McCormick, his parents and maths teacher (Washington Local Schools)
Roman's dad gives Eddie McCarthy a big hug (Washington Local Schools)Roman's health problems started when he was just a year old and when he was just 10 his parents were told he would likely need a new kidney. His parents began an all-out search for a living donor when Roman was in eighth grade. Several people volunteered to get tested but none of them worked out.
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Mr McCarthy said: “I thought it would be hard to see this kid at school every day knowing he needed a kidney, without knowing whether I was a match." After getting tested, he found he was a match and he decided to keep going from there. Throughout the process, he didn't contact the parents so as to not get their hopes up.
He said. “A little bit of pain was something I decided I could endure to prevent a kid from going on dialysis or possibly dying.” Even when the parents were called to say there was a donor who was a match, the teacher remained anonymous. The parents told the paper they began to cry when they heard. Mr McCarthy later revealed himself by calling the parents up.
When Roman's parents went to the school to meet the teacher, dad Dan McCormick gave him a bear hug. No one was more surprised about the identity of the donor than Roman himself. The boy said: “He’s a cool teacher — he sometimes gets out his guitar and plays it for us. But I wasn’t expecting him to donate a kidney after I got decent grades in his class.”
On July 19 the two operations were carried out - first, the teacher's kidney was removed, then it was put into Roman. The transplant went smoothly and the boy was discharged a week later. Despite the success, Roman will need to be on medication for the rest of his life to prevent the transplanted kidney from being rejected.
A GoFundMe was started to help Roman's family pay medical expenses that weren’t covered by insurance. Mr McCarthy’s expenses were covered in full by the University of Michigan Transplant Center.
Although the teacher won't have Roman in his class from Autumn, he is looking forward to giving him a high-five in the hallway. Mr McCarthy said: “It will be pretty crazy when I watch him walk by. I’ll be able to say, ‘There goes my kidney.’”
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