Meet father and son - and organ recipient and donor - Liam and Darren Martin

Little more than a month after receiving a kidney transplant, Liam Martin was back on the tractor on the family suckler farm in Templederry, Co Tipperary – all thanks to his eldest son’s decision to become a donor.

And even now, when he talks about the phone call from Darren that gave him his life back, he can’t help but choke up.

“He said: ‘I’m going to go get tested,’ and I started to cry,” he recalls. “I wasn’t able to answer him. I had to ring him back. It’s still emotional for me.”

Liam’s health issues started in the early ’90s after developing a viral sore throat that damaged his kidneys. While he managed for over 20 years with regular medical check-ups, by 2012 things started to seriously deteriorate, making it almost impossible to farm.

“I just had no energy,” he says. “You’d do something with a fork and your power was gone.

“A good friend who had a transplant told me: ‘You’ll come to the day you’ll just be glad to go on dialysis.’ And I was.”

In December 2012, Liam started home dialysis for 10 hours each night, but after developing a serious infection in March 2014, was told he would have to change to hospital-based haemodialysis, travelling to Limerick three times a week.

That September, however, Darren rang to say he wanted to get tested to see if he would make a suitable kidney donor.

“I wouldn’t dream of asking him,” says Liam of how he was taken aback by his son’s offer, describing him as a “pure hero”.

Darren was not the only person to step up, of course. While awaiting the go ahead for the operation, Liam’s wife Kay and his younger son Cian, who is studying at Gurteen College, took on the farm work, with friends and neighbours also coming to the rescue whenever help was needed with calving or any emergency.

Needless to say, however, Liam was anxious to get back to the farm, and says he felt the benefits of the transplant almost immediately after the operation on 13 April last year.

“You could feel the energy back in yourself within a day,” he recalls. “The nurses said to me: ‘You’re not pressing the morphine for the pain.’ And I said: ‘Sure, I have no pain!’”

Indeed, by 26 May he was back on the tractor, but took his recovery slowly, and still attends the Mater Hospital for monthly check-ups.

However, the transplant has given him a new lease of life.

“I could go to bed at 2am tonight and I could get out of the bed at 7 o’clock as fresh as a daisy,” says Liam, who is also looking forward to returning to showing his Simmentals on the circuit this summer.

And for anybody considering a transplant, he has the following advice: “The advice I would give to anybody is not to worry about it,” he says.

“Get up and go because if you lie down, you’ll stay down.”

In September 2014, Darren Martin was supposed to be on his way to Austria to pursue a master’s in German.

But the moment he heard that his father was starting hospital dialysis, he selflessly sacrificed his place to undergo screening to see if he might make a suitable kidney donor.

“He was always a happy-go-lucky person,” says Darren (25) who works in commercial finance with Kerry Group.

“Then, as the years went on and kidneys started to fail that bit more and more, his energy depleted; and he lost a bit of himself as well. He lost his confidence and his ‘get go’ about himself.”

Despite a fear of needles, Darren went through almost six months of medical tests, as well as psychological screening, to make sure he was fully aware of his undertaking, including the possibility that the transplant could fail.

However, he says that the only really difficult part of the process was when it looked like the transplant might not go ahead due to an issue with his arteries that could complicate the operation.

“After getting so far, it was fairly disheartening,” he says, describing how the family waited “in limbo” until finally getting the go ahead. However, he is full of praise for the transplant team, who coordinated the process.

“I would have had my surgical team and dad would have had his and there was zero interaction between them because my surgeon’s only focus is on my benefit and his surgeon is only for his,” he says, explaining that he had the option to “opt out” right up until the last minute, but was never deterred.

“I had the operation on the Monday and I was out on the Friday, so the recovery was super fast,” says Darren, who credits Kerry Group for their support, as he had to take four weeks off after the operation.

But while he was not allowed to drive for six weeks or use the gym for six months, he soon felt back to normal.

“And now, a couple of little scars are all I have – and that’s about the only memory I have of it,” he says.

However, the fact that he has given his father – and, indeed, the whole family – a new lease of life is the most lasting legacy.

“It’s nice to be able to know that you can help out in that kind of a way,” he says modestly.

“He’s back to himself; and there’s no stopping him.”