25-year wait for new kidney

After 25 years on the kidney transplant register, Mervyn McSorey knows all about the waiting game.

The 50-year-old from Enville, near Stourbridge, has been on the list longer than anyone else in the UK, making him the perfect choice to front the UK Transplant organisation's My Life My Gift organ donation campaign. Figures show the West Midlands has the lowest proportion of people on the donation register in the country, with just 19 per cent compared to the national average of 24 per cent.

Mervyn takes an impressively philosophical view of his plight, one made all the more surprising given the daily reminder he gets of what he is missing out on.

Younger brother William, aged 41, was also struck down with renal failure as a youngster but underwent a transplant at the age of 17.

Mervyn's body failed to adapt to the two ill-fated transplants he had during his early 20s and he has been waiting ever since.

"It's not really a record you want to have," he says.

"I didn't even know until I was at the hospital the other day and one of the nurses told me. I knew it had been a long time, but you stop thinking about it in a way."

A new system is being proposed whereby people would have to opt out of organ donation rather than the current law that states people must actively volunteer.

Surprisingly for someone in such dire need of a transplant, Mervyn, who lives with William and mother Dorothy in the house in Morfe Hall Lane they have been in for 40 years, is very clear that giving up an organ upon death must remain optional.

"People have to have the choice, it can't be forced on anyone," he said.

"Donating organs is a very emotive issue and I don't think it would be a good idea to make people do it against their or their family's will.

"Every extra name on the donor list is brilliant though."

Tamsin May, from UK Transplant, said: "There is a desperate shortage of donors in the UK, which means people are not only having to wait longer for a transplant, but also dying as well."

Log on to www.uktransplant.org.uk or call 0845 6060400.