“Organ donation only good thing that can come out of fatal car crash.”
The 64-year-old GP from Baltray, Co Louth, had a heart transplant seven years ago after developing complications with a bypass he had 10 years earlier. A second bypass wasn't possible and his future looked bleak, not to mention short.
"I was very disabled by that stage. I got angina dressing myself. I was technically unfit to work, but I used to go in as long as I could sit and see patients. It was better than sitting at home getting anxious," he said.
Nine months after his transplant, he was back at the surgery, only this time he wasn't tied to his chair. He now works full-time, jokes that he plays golf as badly as he ever did and says he can do as much or more than most men his age.
He takes a lot of medication to guard against rejection but he has no complaints. "It's great it works," he says. "It's been terrific. The alternative was, well, there wasn't one."
For the moment, 18-year-old Nat Nicholson has an alternative to an organ transplant grin and bear three mind-numbing afternoons a week in hospital hooked up to a dialysis machine.
It takes about three-and-a-half hours a time and saps his energy as well as his patience. "It drains you and after it you're completely out for the count and it's difficult to focus," he says.
Nat was diagnosed with kidney failure at 11 and had a transplant when he was 13, but his body rejected the organ a year later and he has been on dialysis ever since.
The hospital sessions interfered with his Leaving Cert classes and, just one week into his first year of business and social studies at Trinity College, he is anxiously waiting to see how much his new timetable will be disrupted.
And it's not just his studies that suffer. From Slane, Co Kildare, he is enjoying first-time freedom away from home in campus accommodation, but if other parents worry about their student sons partying the term away, Nat's mother and father can rest easy.
Socialising is difficult for him. He can't drink and he can't eat anything containing calcium, salt, potassium or phosphate, which rules out living in the chippers.
He hasn't been on holiday for six years and even his family's holiday house in the west is out of bounds. "I would have gone out tonight. There's a very good party on," he says, "but I know I would be wrecked."
Yet, Nat knows he is lucky in ways. In the three years he has been waiting for another transplant, he has got to know other patients who have to travel to Dublin from the provinces at midnight to fit into dialysis slots at two, three and four in the morning, so under-resourced are Beaumont Hospital's facilities.
"There is a lack of donors my age. I don't think they object to the idea they probably just don't think about. It's an awful thing to say, but the people who most often end smashed up in car accidents are aged 18-25.
"Nobody likes to think about someone that young dying, but I think they could give it a little thought. Organ donation is the only good thing that can come out of a fatal car crash." Nat wants to see a more hard-hitting public awareness campaign. "We need billboards showing people like me on dialysis or showing someone jaundiced with liver disease or using somebody waiting for a lung transplant on breathing apparatus," he says. "This isn't fun. This is how it is to need an organ."
Each year, Dr Kearney attends an ecumenical service at the Mater Hospital in Dublin for the donors and their families and he says their bravery is never forgotten but he, too, knows it is not an easy subject for many.
"People have a natural unease about donation. They have a hidden fear that something might happen to their relative who might otherwise survive and it's a tremendously big decision for relatives to make on the spur of the moment if they've never thought about it before," he says.
"I think there is an unease particularly in relation to the heart. People see it as the centre of things and in some way connected to the soul. But the medical profession treats donors as carefully and professionally and with as much respect as everyone they operate on. It's surgery, not mutilation.
"It's a struggle for everyone involved the donor's family, the patient, their family," he says. "It is traumatic but it's all worth it."
Further info on organ donation at www.beaumont.ie and www.ika.ie.
