IT WAS heartbreakingly restrictive being hooked up to a machine that took waste and water from his blood for eight hours, seven nights a week.
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As well as preventing kidney patient Steve Hardy, 68, of Sylvania, from sleeping properly, his dialysis machine meant he had to stay at home each night.
Last week he came home from hospital with a new kidney after a transplant that has turned his life around.
At the start of the year Mr Hardy's kidney function had fallen to 8 per cent but his wife and two children, all diabetic, couldn't provide him with a donor kidney.
Up stepped his daughter-in-law, a Filipina named May Hardy, who volunteered to donate one of her kidneys.
"I was shocked; she's young and she has a couple of little kids," Mr Hardy said.
"I wanted to make sure May meant it, and she was very certain, she wants me to be around to play with her kids."
There were many tests for May that Mr Hardy described as "horrendous".
"She went ahead with her chin up, and she's already gone back to work," he said.
Mr Hardy said it was hard to think of what May had done for him without getting a tear in his eye.
"Some people take five years to get a donor," Mr Hardy said.
May researched the implications of her decision.
"Naturally I worry about my health but after I did my research I found everything was pretty positive," she said.
She set off on a round of procedures that took a year.
"There was a lot of needles, a lot of radiology and CT scans and lots of blood tests and the hospital [Prince of Wales at Randwick] really looked after me."
She said that with no blood relatives in Australia, her in-laws were like parents to her.
"My father-in-law is like my dad. I am very happy now."
May hopes sharing her experience will encourage others to become organ donors.
■ Would you volunteer to be an organ donor?
