Brad Bywater sat in a wheelchair at his daughter’s high school May 2023 graduation, unable to stand and hardly able to cheer. ...
Bywater, a husband, father, optometrist, and member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from San Tan Valley, Arizona, has lived his entire life with polycystic kidney disease—an inherited condition that causes cysts to proliferate throughout the kidneys until they fail.
In January 2023, Bywater’s kidneys slipped into renal failure. By his daughter’s spring graduation, walking to the kitchen left him out of breath. ...
In March of that same year, Bywater and his wife, Angela, received a phone call from Brad’s nephrologist. “‘Hey, I need you to come in as soon as possible … we need to talk,’” Brad Bywater recalled being told.
Bywater’s kidney function rate had plummeted below 20, the threshold for avoiding a kidney transplant. That day, the Bywaters spoke with the doctor about being put on the transplant list, one that usually takes five years to rise to the top. ...
Five months later, Bywater was officially listed on Mayo Clinic’s national kidney transplant wait list. The family made a single Facebook post asking people to consider getting tested as potential donors, including a link to sign up at the bottom of the post. ...
One of his Facebook friends who saw the post was Chris Runkel, the Bywaters’ assigned ministering brother at the time. Even though the two did not know each other deeply, “I kept getting that feeling to get tested,” Runkel said.
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