By Tony Morrison, Staff Reporter
Each year, as part of its community service initiative, the Gleaner Company Ltd. presents the Gleaner Honour Award to a person or individual who has made a significant and meaningful contribution to the country.
At the 21st annual staging of the prestigious awards last night at the Hilton Kingston Hotel, the Hon. Professor Dr. Lawson Douglas walked away with the 2000 Gleaner Honour Award. A Merit Award went to cricketer Courtney Walsh and a Special Award went to the human rights lobby group Jamaicans For Justice.
AN ESTIMATED 750 Jamaicans experience last-stage kidney failure each year.
Of this number, only about 150 can get treated through local health facilities and in order for someone on the waiting list to get treatment, someone else has to either receive a kidney transplant or die.
Getting on the coveted list then carries its own curse, because in addition to fighting off the crippling effects of a kidney malfunction, you now have to cough up about $70,000 per month for dialysis therapy. Alternately, a transplant can still cost half a million dollars even if the surgeons donate their services.
Enter Dr. Ludlow Lawson Douglas, OJ, CD, urology professor, the Caribbean's premier practitioner of kidney transplantation, trainer of urologists across the Caribbean and founding member of the Kidney Support Foundation. He's been working on kidneys since 1967, handled the first cadaver kidney transplant in Jamaica and the West Indies in 1970, introduced dialysis that same year and performed the first kidney transplant from a live donor in 1994.
Deeply concerned about the prohibitive costs affecting kidney patients, he has been a leading fund-raiser for the cause, an advocate of research into not only how to treat ailing kidneys, but also how best the rest of us can keep our kidneys healthy.
In other words, he's your kidney's best friend.
His fund-raising efforts for the kidney cause have gone so far as to put his life on the line, as last year he led an islandwide 400-mile walkathon while ill, and only two years after undergoing heart surgery. He happily conceded in a Sunday Gleaner interview at the time that many of his colleagues might have thought he was mad.
"I want them to make some big bets. I want them to say this man is 65, and with a triple bypass in 1997 and with function in only one lung (the result of a motor vehicle accident), he won't make it."
But make it he did, raising more than $1.5 million in the process, and the sceptics should not have been surprised, as a check into his background would have revealed he not only has been walking around 22 miles per week (at four miles an hour!) since that surgery in 1997, but that as a schoolboy he excelled in tennis, kept a mean wicket at cricket, and enjoyed near-legendary status as a football goalkeeper.
He still keeps going, and going, and in addition to his medical work and fund-raising in Jamaica, consults in the Cayman Islands once per month, and somewhere in the middle of that blistering pace, he still finds time for a wife and three children, golf, tennis, squash and writing the odd letter to newspaper editors to champion a few non-kidney-related causes.
"The bottom line is money ...," he told The Gleaner on Monday, when asked about Jamaica's capacity to treat what can be an excruciatingly expensive disease.
"We need money to train and pay staff and expand facilities so sick people don't have to travel across the island to have treatment ... and to buy drugs to keep transplanted kidneys healthy ... the solution can be simple ... if one million of the 2.5 million Jamaicans gave a $20 coin each year, that's $20 million, a good start ... and if big companies give a little more, then we would be well on track!"
