PORTLAND, Maine — Months after friends and family mobilized to help a young Portland athlete find health insurance to get him on the list for a kidney transplant, he’s reaching out to the dozens of people who offered to donate a kidney, hoping they’ll get tested to help him find a match.
Thiwat Thiwat, 21, a former basketball standout on the Deering High School 2012 state championship team, was diagnosed with kidney failure that same year.
Still, Bob Walsh, now head coach at the University of Maine, recruited Thiwat to play for him at Rhode Island College, where Walsh coached at the time.
Thiwat struggled with declining health through his first year in college and didn’t play ball. As his kidney function deteriorated, he returned to Maine to live with his “foster grandmother,” Bonnie Kam.
In May, he completed his sophomore year at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland while working as a security guard at Texas Instruments.
On May 23, he learned he was nearing kidney failure, and he was admitted to Maine Medical Center in Portland. That was when he learned his MaineCare health insurance ended when he turned 21 in October 2015. Without insurance, he could not be placed on a kidney transplant list or receive lifesaving dialysis treatments as an outpatient, so he could continue to work and attend college classes while working toward his dream: to transfer to UMaine and play basketball for Walsh.
Cindi Taylor, who has been Thiwat’s second mom since he was in her English language learner kindergarten class shortly after arriving in the United States from war-torn South Sudan in 1999, led an email and phone campaign to secure insurance.
Days after Thiwat’s story appeared in The Bangor Daily News, staff at U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ office called to say he had been added to the MaineCare system, retroactive to May.
The story and others that followed spurred many calls and email messages from people as far away as Australia, offering to be tested as a donor match.
“The amount of support I had was ridiculous,” he said Thursday during an interview. “I felt like the whole state was behind me.”
But the timing was off because Thiwat’s MaineCare paperwork still was being processed, his health hadn’t quite stabilized and he wasn’t officially on the transplant list.
By the time he became eligible for the transplant, he said Thursday, those potential donors haven’t yet been tested, leaving him frustrated.
“There’s a lot I want to do with my future, while I’m still healthy or relatively healthy,” he said.
Throughout the summer, Thiwat completed two classes, despite sitting through dialysis three days per week from 7:30 a.m. to nearly 4 p.m. and working 20 hours per week at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, a job he found after he was unable to continue his security job at Texas Instruments because of his rigorous dialysis schedule.
Last week, Thiwat began a full slate of classes at Southern Maine Community College, including sports psychology, and has been feeling pretty good most days, though dialysis sometimes leaves him crampy and sometimes he gets depressed about the wait for a transplant.
“It’s a roller coaster,” Thiwat said Thursday. “As soon as this thing started, I told myself to have a level head, to be patient and let people come to their own terms about what they could do to help.”
Thiwat is convinced the dozens of people who offered to be tested simply aren’t receiving the emails the Maine Transplant Program has sent out. He has shared the program’s phone number with some of them and a few are due to be tested, but he’s hoping to reach everyone who contacted him earlier.
The donor’s evaluation, surgery and follow-up care is covered by the recipient’s insurance, according to the Maine Transplant Program.
Even if someone is not a match for Thiwat, through kidney exchange programs, that person could donate a kidney to another patient and an “exchange” kidney could be arranged from another living donor.
A successful transplant would allow him to move forward full-speed with college, maybe basketball, and return some of the good will he’s been offered by Mainers.
“Hopefully, I can go back to Sudan and help the people there, too,” he said.
To learn more about being tested to donate a kidney, visit the Maine Transplant Program website at mmc.org/living-donation#link1 or call 662-7180.