Cuan van Staden is a 28-year-old waiting for a kidney transplant. 

He knew that his kidney function was decreasing due to renal disease, although it’s unclear exactly what caused the decline of his kidney function over time.

When he was around 15 years old, Cuan can remember having a year of being really unwell, with lots of chest infections and illness. Since then, his kidney function has declined until he reached a point in September 2023 where he had to begin dialysis. For the first few months, he was attending the dialysis regularly and soon realised this would have been difficult for him to sustain ongoing employment long term. 

After exploring the possibility of a family member being a potential living donor and discovering this would not be possible. Cuan began to realise that his dialysis and transplant journey was potentially going to be longer than he initially thought. After 4 months of Haemodialysis, Cuan transitioned to receiving peritoneal dialysis (PD) every night at home. Although Cuan needs to dialyse every night at home, it does free up his daytime to enable him to continue working full time as a carpenter. Due to the small size of hi PD machine, Cuan can sometimes still plan for single night trips away from home, so long as he has availability of power to operate his machine which is reasonably portable.

It means he can sometimes get out and about for overnight adventures. To take his mind off the limitations of renal failure, dialysis and needing a transplant, Cuan has remained very active. With the support of a good mate, he is able to continue his passion for bushwalking and is an aspiring ‘peak bagger’. Tasmania is well known for its wilderness and challenging mountain peaks. There are 158 peaks that have been identified as ‘Abels’. Cuan is about four years into his passion to climb as many Abels as he can and has almost completed 40 climbs. The peacefulness of walking in the wilderness provides a great sense of relative normality, which Cuan describes as a bit of a reset for him, to distract him from his treatment.

Receiving a kidney transplant would be life changing for him.

He looks forward to having the freedom of not having to dialyse every night and be more spontaneous with his travel and adventures. In the back of his mind is the possibility that he might receive a call at any time to say a kidney has become available. When he receives a call from an unknown number or caller, it’s easy to shift his thinking to: “is this it, is this the call I’m waiting for?” 

He keeps a bag packed in hopeful readiness that the call will come soon.

Stories like Cuan’s highlight why every Australian should consider Joining the Organ and Tissue Donation Register