By Marjory Inglis, health reporter

SID GRANT from Kinross will have the luck of the Irish when he competes in the British Transplant Games in Edinburgh next week.

For the last 18 years a kidney donated by a stranger from Cork has kept him alive and enabled him to compete as an athlete.

That gift has also saved NHS Tayside tens of thousands of pounds—taking away the need for Sid to be hooked up to a dialysis machine. It costs between £35,000 and £40,000 a year to keep someone on dialysis. The machine cleans toxins from the blood when kidneys fail.

“Kidney transplantation is one of the few things in medicine that is not only better for the patients’ health and well being but cheaper for the tax payer as well,” said Dr Iain Henderson, the specialist who heads the renal unit at Dundee’s Ninewells Hospital, where all patients from Tayside and many from Fife are treated.

The transplant games help raise awareness of organ donation and the gift of a normal life that it gives to people who would otherwise face death or, in the case of kidney failure, depend on a dialysis machine for survival.

Now aged 59 Sid isn’t expecting to bring back any medals from the transplant games, though he has high hopes for his Tayside team mate Graham Matthew, from Montrose, who works as a lab technician at Ninewells.

“I would reckon Graham will probably come back with two or three medals,” said Sid.

Graham already has medals for his squash playing and at next week’s transplant games he will be competing on court and joining Sid in the 5k walk.

The Tayside team is completed by David Officer, also from Montrose, and Murray Smith from Perthshire, who are both competing at golf.

All four of the Tayside team have transplanted kidneys, and while Sid’s has kept functioning for the last 18 years, his is not the longest surviving transplant organ.

Dr Henderson said that several local patients were surviving well with a kidney transplanted 20 years ago.

He keeps an eye on around 150 people who have transplanted kidneys, either from a cadaver donor or from a living relative. These patients take drugs daily to stop the organ being rejected and boost the immune system, but otherwise live normal lives. They visit an out patient clinic just a few times a year to allow doctors to check their general health and kidney function.

Without a transplant these patients would require dialysis three times a week to clean the toxins from their blood. Dr Henderson said it costs between £35,000 and £40,000 a year to keep a patient on dialysis.

A further 160 people attend Ninewells three times a week for dialysis. Not all are suitable for transplantation but others are hoping for the phone call that will tell them a suitable organ has become available and they should head immediately to the operating theatre.

Anyone wishing to join the organ donor register can get details from the Donor Bus which is touring Scotland ahead of the transplant games. It will visit Stirling on Monday, Perth on Tuesday, Dundee on Wednesday and will be in Dunfermline on Thursday before heading for the games’ opening ceremony that evening.