Comedian Jarlath Regan on donating his kidney to save his brother
Not everybody in life gets to become a hero but when the chance presented itself to the comedian and podcast star, Jarlath Regan, he grabbed it with gusto.
In an exclusive interview, which will be published in full in the Irish Examiner tomorrow, the 36-year-old, Co Kildare-born comic reveals how last June, as it became apparent that his only brother, Adrian, who is older than him by a decade, needed a kidney transplant, he didn’t have to think twice about it.
“I laid my cards firmly on the table the second it was mentioned,” he says. “I’d give it to him tomorrow if he needed it. I said I would post it to him. I don’t know where that feeling came from, but I guess people reading this interview can probably relate to it – there are things that you’ll do for your family that you’d have to think long and hard about for other people.
“My brother was my best friend growing up. He had been a support the whole way through my life. A second father is how I’d describe my brother to me. I joke about it but if he came back to me now and said, ‘It’s not actually the kidney this time, it’s my thumb; I need another thumb,’ I’d happily give him mine.”
Regan’s brother works as a stud farmer in Kentucky, USA where he lives with his wife. The operation was scheduled for early February at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, New York. As the date for it drew closer, his kid brother wasn’t assailed by doubts about the organ donation.
“I didn’t have any moment of, ‘oh, no, am I doing the wrong thing?’ at any time,” says Regan. “I asked when I was being assessed mentally – and overall – at the Mayo Clinic: ‘Was this normal? Why was I not feeling any anxiety?’ They said, ‘It’s not unheard of. People can be very gung-ho about it. Donors are special people.’
“But they said also, identifying something quite rightly: ‘Often when the person is as gung-ho as I was that the strain, the doubts and the anxiety can be transferred onto their nearest person,’ which in my case is my wife who has her own kidney issues. This is not my first rodeo. My wife’s kidney situation for the 17 years that we’ve been together has not been good and has required hospitalisation at various different times. Ironically, many of the tablets that my brother now takes, as anti-rejection medicine, she has been taking for the duration of our relationship.
“I think she internalised a lot of the worry that I simply didn’t feel. There was a long period of me talking her through it, and explaining why I was so steadfast that this was the thing that I would do.”
