Miceál has been given a second and third chance at life. He calls it his “X Factor sob story”. He was born with kidney disease and while growing up he always knew that one day his kidneys would fail and that he’d need a transplant. At 29, he has been the recipient of not one, but two kidney transplants. He had his first one when he was 14 and another just last year. The donors? His own brother and sister, Edward and Cathy.

“With that first transplant, they had told me that I would probably get a maximum of fifteen years out of it because our bodies change so much from when you're fourteen until you're thirty.”

When the second kidney started to fail, Miceál was incredibly touched by the amount of family and even friends who went and got tested to see if they were a suitable match to be a donor. “People were coming out of the woodwork really wanting to help, which was the most beautiful thing ever”.

Thankfully they found an almost perfect match very close to home and the better the match, the less chance of rejection. “There's a lot of different factors that come into finding a match, like tissue typing. It's how close the actual makeup of your DNA is to the donor. And Cathy, my sister, her and I were perfect across all of the markers. The only way it could have been closer would have been if we were identical twins”.

He is, of course, incredibly grateful to his donors, and does not take a single moment in life for granted. “I suppose you can look at it as like an operation or a surgery, but genuinely it was just another amazing chance for me to go out and live, travel, experience different jobs, meet new people and just live my best life. I’m so grateful to them both. They know that and now they always call on me first to babysit their kids.”

These sentiments of incredible gratitude are echoed all across the transplant community. This isn’t the first time we’ve spoken about the importance of donors and transplants on our Sin Scéal Eile podcast. We chatted to David Quinney Mee in Ballycastle not long ago who shared his daughter, Lucia’s, story. She was the recipient of multiple liver transplants in her short life. She kept an incredibly positive blog until she died, urging people to “live loudly, donate proudly”.

Without living donors, Miceál’s story could have been a different one altogether. “I won't speak to my brother or sister’s experience of recovery, I know it’s very difficult going through a surgery like that. But they’re both thriving now and I think that those who do decide to become living donors, they will always have the benefit of knowing they did something amazing for someone else.”

Miceál and I end our conversation in the same way I did with Lucia’s dad, with a plea to everybody who is hearing this story to make your organ donation wishes known to your loved ones, and to consider becoming a living donor. You could give someone a second chance at life.