Your help can create a safer path for kidney transplant patients.
A successful kidney transplant was not the cure Tim had been hoping for.
It was the beginning of a frightening journey for him and his family.
Meet Tim... his kidney transplant should have been the beginning, but it ended in bladder cancer.
My name is Tim and I’ve been a kidney patient since I was in my twenties. I have IgA nephropathy and I lived with declining kidney function for years before receiving a kidney transplant in 2015. It was a real gift, enabling me to avoid having to go on dialysis.
After my kidney transplant, people said I looked amazing. And I did feel good. But that feeling faded fast.
Within a couple of weeks I started feeling poorly. At first, my consultant thought I was experiencing kidney rejection. But after more tests, they realised I had BK virus infection.
BK virus is a common illness that most of us have in our bodies from childhood. But in my case, immunosuppression treatment to prevent transplant rejection had reactivated it, triggering something much worse.
The doctors said the only way to treat BK virus infection is with your own immune system. But my immune system was being suppressed to stop my kidney being rejected. So they had to lower my immunosuppression drugs very carefully. They wanted to unleash my body’s defence system just enough so it could tackle the virus, but not so much that it started to attack my new kidney too. Getting that balance just right was hard. It was like walking a tightrope.
I felt awful much of the time. It took four long years for my body to overcome the infection.
I felt better for a while, but then new problems began.
I was having trouble weeing. The flow wasn’t normal. The doctors suspected it might be something to do with my prostate gland. I went for multiple tests and they found a mysterious lesion in my bladder. They took a biopsy and a little while later, the results came in.
I remember sitting opposite the urologist in the hospital, he said, “You’ve got stage one bladder cancer.”
For people like Tim, life after transplant can come with so many challenges, but with your help, we can fund new research to find solutions.
You can help create a safer path for kidney transplant patients.
Dr Simon Baker has recorded a video for you, explaining his amazing research in two minutes.
People who have had a kidney transplant are three times more likely to develop bladder cancer. Researchers have suspected that BK virus, a common illness 90% of people have had by age four, could be involved, but until now, no one knew why.
Dr Simon Baker and his team at the University of York have been studying the link between BK virus infection and bladder cancer. Their results suggest that the virus can trigger changes in DNA that drive bladder cancer development.
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