In sickness and in HEALTH

When Sarah Beaumont's husband needed a kidney transplant, there was no doubt in her mind about what she needed to do

- MICHELLE ROWLEY

When Sarah Beaumont arrived home excitedly to tell her husband Carl that she'd found a good minibreak deal for the coming weekend, his response wasn't what she expected. 'I was excited to share what I'd found, but Carl said it was likely he'd be in hospital then. I didn't understand what was going on,' says the 41-year-old from Wakefield, West Yorkshire. 'He told me he needed to get to A&E at Pinderfields Hospital as quickly as possible.'

Carl, now 52, had been driving their son Remy, now 13, home from his kick-boxing class in November 2020 when the hospital had called to say he needed to come in immediately. 'They'd told him he was in renal failure, with only 4% kidney function,' Sarah explains. "We were both in a bit of a daze as he packed some things together.'

A routine eye test at the opticians several weeks earlier had revealed a bleed behind the eye. The optician had referred Carl for blood tests at the Eye Centre in Wakefield just two days prior to the hospital's phone call. 'The situation had turned from assuming the bleed was linked to high blood pressure to something completely unexpected,' Sarah says.

Due to lockdown restrictions, Carl had to go into hospital alone while Sarah had an agonising overnight wait for an update. 'It was the longest night of my life, and utter relief when I finally got a text in the morning from Carl,' Sarah remembers. 'But over the next week, while he stayed in hospital, we couldn't keep in touch as much as I had hoped. It was incredibly stressful.'

By the end of the week, they received the shocking news that not only would Carl need regular dialysis treatment but he might also need to go on the waiting list for a kidney donor.