Daughter helps Frisco man get kidney transplant through donor exchange
FRISCO, Texas — After waiting for nearly two decades to find a match, a Frisco man is finally about to receive a new kidney thanks to his daughter's hard work and a new organ donation program.
At first glance, Stephen Gilmore, 52, might look well and healthy - but there's more to his story. He has kidney failure.
Gilmore says he first found out that his kidneys would fail when he was diagnosed with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a rare disease where scar tissue develops on the kidneys, when he was just 16 years old.
That's exactly what happened just 11 years later. Gilmore's kidneys failed at the age of 27.
"My brother was a match for me then, and he was able to give me a kidney back in 1999," Gilmore said.
But in 2005, about the time Gilmore lost his job, that kidney failed too. He struggled to keep up with payments for the immunosuppressants he needed to keep up with the kidney he received.
"I lost my insurance, and the immunosuppressants can be as much as $1000 a month… I couldn't manage that," Gilmore said.
He lost the kidney. "From that point to now I've been on dialysis ever since," Gilmore said.
But now, he's received the news he's been anticipating for nearly 20 years - he's getting a new kidney. "I'm excited, I'm anxious," Gilmore said. "I'm all the things that come along with waiting for something for 17 years."
His prayers have been answered thanks to his own daughter. "I was blown away, because you never expect to have to lean on your children," Gilmore said.
More than 30 strangers came forward to donate, but none were a match. After going through a number of options that didn't work out, his daughter, Aarika Cofer, stepped up to try something they had never tried before.
"The kidney exchange was our next option," Cofer said.
"In a paired exchanged program, pairs of incompatible donor and recipients are entered and every now and then when a new pair is added, it will facilitate swaps," said Dr. Eric Martinez, an abdominal transplant surgeon at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. "It's not that we couldn't do this before, it just wasn't as easy logistically."
In other words, Cofer will donate her kidney and in exchange, her father will receive a kidney from another donor.
"I'm happy and it's just overwhelming to know through my daughter's hard work," Gilmore said. "I want to be able to see my grandchildren graduate and a couple more grandchildren by my younger kids and that's my life goal. That's all I ever really wanted when I was coming up, I wanted to be a dad."
They offered advice for anyone who's hearing their story.
"It has to be a team effort between your care team and your family," Gilmore said.
"I think that people should really think about organ donation or at least being a donor when they ask you on your driver's license," Cofer said. "It makes such a difference and there's so many people that are waiting for this to be their story."
You can find more information about the paired exchange program here.