Trevor’s gift of life- Margaret Shotter gave husband Trevor one of her kidneys. 60512

By Mara Pattison-Sowden
TREVOR Shotter knows how to enjoy life – his Harley Davidson says it all.
But for the past 25 years the father of four has also been living with a debilitating disease that was killing his kidneys, until his wife Margaret donated one of hers.
The twist here is that Margaret and Trevor have different blood types, and up until several years ago a kidney transplant could only occur between donors of matching blood types.
Technology has caught up with the Launching Place couple, who went through a long and trying ordeal of dialysis, surgery and recovery.
“I was pregnant with our second boy when we found he had the disease, so really none of the children have ever known him as a healthy person,” Margaret said.
Trevor’s diagnosis was 25 years ago when he went to the doctor thinking he had a three-week hangover, but was diagnosed with kidney disease.
The 49-year-old said it was a slow process of “going downhill” for 22 years, before his left kidney was removed in July 2007.
Trevor went straight onto dialysis, where his blood was pumped through an artificial kidney machine to cleanse the blood of toxic waste products. “I was an outdoors man, and to go from that to doing nothing was awful,” he said.
He would have to insert a 2mm needle attached to the machine into a fistula in his arm, where the artery and vein is joined together to form a larger vein that pumps more blood.
Trevor spent three years on the machine, every two days for five hours a day.
“I hated it. It was depressing. I just wanted to be left alone when I was on that thing,” he said.
“They were going to take out the right kidney at one stage and then I’d be on dialysis every day and I said ‘Nup, forget it’. Every two days I could sort of live with,” he said.
Margaret said Trevor was the problem child, “if something was going to go wrong, it did with Trev”.
His fistula got infected, medications weren’t always available, he had a bad reaction to surgery, and one of the more traumatic times was when he was almost given a dud kidney.
That was when Margaret decided to offer her own kidney.
“I asked if I could do it being a different blood group and they said ‘yes, nowadays you can’,” she said.
Margaret said Trevor was not yet 100 per cent, but he was more active, even taking a family break last month to Yarrawonga.
“It was the first time I went away that I could do things with the girls,” he said.
This week is DonateLife Week, Australia’s national awareness week to promote organ and tissue donation. Last year’s 309 donors saved or significantly improved the lives of 931 Australians.