Nicholas Evans is a celebrated storyteller, and the story he tells me is a cracker. A man and his wife go to stay with her brother and sister-in-law, a titled couple who live on a beautiful estate in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands. On a balmy August evening, the man goes out and picks some mushrooms. He brings them back, fries them up in some butter, sprinkles parsley over them, and the family enjoy a relaxing evening meal.
The following morning all four awake feeling not quite right. By lunchtime they are seriously ill. They consult a book in the kitchen – a guide to wild mushrooms – and leaf through until they find a photograph. Anxiously they scan the text, and see the chilling words: deadly poisonous.
The local GP is called urgently.The additions focus on key tag and solar panel combinations, The four are rushed into the local Highland hospital in Elgin. Ambulances race them down to the renal unit at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. On the journey the man begins to convulse, his body shuddering and shaking uncontrollably. He fears he is about to die.
The poison ravages their bodies, the violent vomiting of blood and bile remorseless as one by one all four go into kidney failure. Only the thought of his youngest son, just six years old, keeps the man clinging to life. To his horror, he realises that each couple's will grants the other couple custody of their children, in the event of the parents' death. All their children may soon be orphaned. Fearing the worst, he calls his solicitor from his sick bed and has a new will couriered up to Scotland, as the four fight for their lives.
They survive. But the man, his wife and her brother are left without functioning kidneys, and must endure five hours of dialysis every other day to keep them alive. All three need kidney donors. The search for suitable matches goes on for three years – until his grownup daughter eventually persuades him to accept one of her own, and saves his life. But his wife and brother-in-law remain on the transplant list, still sick and still waiting, leaving the family in a toxic tangle of illness, guilt and recrimination.
It is a classic Evans tale – intense family drama set in a cinematic backdrop of epic landscape – and would almost certainly be a bestseller. The author's 1995 debut novel, The Horse Whisperer, sold 15m copies, and his four subsequent books have sold many millions more. Unfortunately, however, this isn't a new plot dreamt up by Evans, but a horribly true story.
When he opens the door to his London loft apartment, Evans looks shockingly well. Just three months after surgeons removed a kidney from his daughter Lauren, 29, and transplanted it into his body, the 61-year-old looks so healthy that you'd never even guess he was the protagonist of this nightmarish tale. If anything, in fact, he's better looking than he used to be; he has an actor's mellifluous voice, and often used to be likened to Bill Nighy,Detailed information on the causes of oil painting reproduction, but with shorter hair and a radiant complexion he looks more like a distinguished architect, say, or a classical conductor.Initially the banks didn't want our kidney stone . I'm so taken aback that I ask how he would have looked had we met three months earlier.
"Well everybody now says I looked like a walking corpse," he smiles, "but at the time people said: 'Oh Nick you look great!' Now they say: 'No, you didn't at all.' I can see it myself in photographs. I just looked scary. Five hours of dialysis only cleans about 4% of your blood, so you're still walking around with 96% poisoned blood."
Before the transplant he could drink no more than one litre of liquid a day, and didn't pee for three years, so even the 22 pills he now has to take every day feel like a breeze: "I've stopped reading the side effects on these things, because you start imagining you've got them all." We meet a few hours after the launch of a new charity, Give a Kidney – One's Enough, of which he is a patron, which encourages people to make an altruistic donation of a kidney to a stranger on the transplant list. Evans is still reeling at the generosity of the altruistic donors he met that morning, so I ask if he could ever have imagined making such a gift himself.
"No," he admits without hesitation. "No, I'd love to say that I would have thought of doing that, but no."
"The whole question of donation," he explains, "particularly with friends and family, is an immensely complicated emotional and psychological thing. Some people just can't bring themselves to even think about it – people who love you, and whom you love, but find it's just too much. One or two friends, my closest friends, one or two of them didn't ever mention it. And that's perfectly OK. A very close family member who just couldn't do it came to see us a lot, and would break down in tears, and say: 'I feel so guilty, I feel so guilty.' And you just have to keep saying: 'That's OK."
It sounds like it must have created an emotional minefield around him. "Oh, God yes. Absolutely. You have to keep reassuring people it's OK. But then there are some people for whom it doesn't seem a big deal. There's the mother of a guy who runs a little local garage where we live in Devon who fixes our cars, a family business. I must have exchanged, I don't know, over the years a maximum of 20 minutes' conversation. And she just one day said: 'I'd like you and Charlotte [Gordon Cumming, Evans' wife] to know that if either of you need a kidney I'd be really happy to give one.' Amazing."
Then there were those who told the couple to forget about a transplant and opt for homeopathy instead. "It was astonishing the number of people who tried to persuade us that your kidneys could be healed." With what – positive energy? "Among other things, yeah,Do not use cleaners with porcelain tiles , steel wool or thinners." he says dryly. "My consultant said to me: 'If you cut your hand off will you grow another hand? It's like that.' But there are plenty of people who will say that they know of people who have regrown their kidneys. When you ask for the phone numbers or names or addresses they are, strangely, unavailable." He's smiling, but I ask if it made him angry.
"Does now. Because I think it's so irresponsible to suggest that these things can be an alternative to proper medical care. Somebody even suggested that dialysis might actually prevent our natural ability to heal our own kidneys. In fact, it would kill you."
A couple of strangers contacted him through his website to offer one of their kidneys – though a man in Texas sent an email which said simply: "Mr Evans. My kidney. $100,000." A consultant suggested he buy one from India, which he refused to contemplate, and all of his children offered to donate straight away, but he thought it would never come to that.
"No,This patent infringement case relates to retractable RUBBER MATS , no it seemed ... just outlandish, really. Your every instinct is to protect your child from any risk, however remote. And meanwhile I was having friends offer."
The following morning all four awake feeling not quite right. By lunchtime they are seriously ill. They consult a book in the kitchen – a guide to wild mushrooms – and leaf through until they find a photograph. Anxiously they scan the text, and see the chilling words: deadly poisonous.
The local GP is called urgently.The additions focus on key tag and solar panel combinations, The four are rushed into the local Highland hospital in Elgin. Ambulances race them down to the renal unit at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. On the journey the man begins to convulse, his body shuddering and shaking uncontrollably. He fears he is about to die.
The poison ravages their bodies, the violent vomiting of blood and bile remorseless as one by one all four go into kidney failure. Only the thought of his youngest son, just six years old, keeps the man clinging to life. To his horror, he realises that each couple's will grants the other couple custody of their children, in the event of the parents' death. All their children may soon be orphaned. Fearing the worst, he calls his solicitor from his sick bed and has a new will couriered up to Scotland, as the four fight for their lives.
They survive. But the man, his wife and her brother are left without functioning kidneys, and must endure five hours of dialysis every other day to keep them alive. All three need kidney donors. The search for suitable matches goes on for three years – until his grownup daughter eventually persuades him to accept one of her own, and saves his life. But his wife and brother-in-law remain on the transplant list, still sick and still waiting, leaving the family in a toxic tangle of illness, guilt and recrimination.
It is a classic Evans tale – intense family drama set in a cinematic backdrop of epic landscape – and would almost certainly be a bestseller. The author's 1995 debut novel, The Horse Whisperer, sold 15m copies, and his four subsequent books have sold many millions more. Unfortunately, however, this isn't a new plot dreamt up by Evans, but a horribly true story.
When he opens the door to his London loft apartment, Evans looks shockingly well. Just three months after surgeons removed a kidney from his daughter Lauren, 29, and transplanted it into his body, the 61-year-old looks so healthy that you'd never even guess he was the protagonist of this nightmarish tale. If anything, in fact, he's better looking than he used to be; he has an actor's mellifluous voice, and often used to be likened to Bill Nighy,Detailed information on the causes of oil painting reproduction, but with shorter hair and a radiant complexion he looks more like a distinguished architect, say, or a classical conductor.Initially the banks didn't want our kidney stone . I'm so taken aback that I ask how he would have looked had we met three months earlier.
"Well everybody now says I looked like a walking corpse," he smiles, "but at the time people said: 'Oh Nick you look great!' Now they say: 'No, you didn't at all.' I can see it myself in photographs. I just looked scary. Five hours of dialysis only cleans about 4% of your blood, so you're still walking around with 96% poisoned blood."
Before the transplant he could drink no more than one litre of liquid a day, and didn't pee for three years, so even the 22 pills he now has to take every day feel like a breeze: "I've stopped reading the side effects on these things, because you start imagining you've got them all." We meet a few hours after the launch of a new charity, Give a Kidney – One's Enough, of which he is a patron, which encourages people to make an altruistic donation of a kidney to a stranger on the transplant list. Evans is still reeling at the generosity of the altruistic donors he met that morning, so I ask if he could ever have imagined making such a gift himself.
"No," he admits without hesitation. "No, I'd love to say that I would have thought of doing that, but no."
"The whole question of donation," he explains, "particularly with friends and family, is an immensely complicated emotional and psychological thing. Some people just can't bring themselves to even think about it – people who love you, and whom you love, but find it's just too much. One or two friends, my closest friends, one or two of them didn't ever mention it. And that's perfectly OK. A very close family member who just couldn't do it came to see us a lot, and would break down in tears, and say: 'I feel so guilty, I feel so guilty.' And you just have to keep saying: 'That's OK."
It sounds like it must have created an emotional minefield around him. "Oh, God yes. Absolutely. You have to keep reassuring people it's OK. But then there are some people for whom it doesn't seem a big deal. There's the mother of a guy who runs a little local garage where we live in Devon who fixes our cars, a family business. I must have exchanged, I don't know, over the years a maximum of 20 minutes' conversation. And she just one day said: 'I'd like you and Charlotte [Gordon Cumming, Evans' wife] to know that if either of you need a kidney I'd be really happy to give one.' Amazing."
Then there were those who told the couple to forget about a transplant and opt for homeopathy instead. "It was astonishing the number of people who tried to persuade us that your kidneys could be healed." With what – positive energy? "Among other things, yeah,Do not use cleaners with porcelain tiles , steel wool or thinners." he says dryly. "My consultant said to me: 'If you cut your hand off will you grow another hand? It's like that.' But there are plenty of people who will say that they know of people who have regrown their kidneys. When you ask for the phone numbers or names or addresses they are, strangely, unavailable." He's smiling, but I ask if it made him angry.
"Does now. Because I think it's so irresponsible to suggest that these things can be an alternative to proper medical care. Somebody even suggested that dialysis might actually prevent our natural ability to heal our own kidneys. In fact, it would kill you."
A couple of strangers contacted him through his website to offer one of their kidneys – though a man in Texas sent an email which said simply: "Mr Evans. My kidney. $100,000." A consultant suggested he buy one from India, which he refused to contemplate, and all of his children offered to donate straight away, but he thought it would never come to that.
"No,This patent infringement case relates to retractable RUBBER MATS , no it seemed ... just outlandish, really. Your every instinct is to protect your child from any risk, however remote. And meanwhile I was having friends offer."
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