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Horse Whisperer author Nicholas Evans' kidney donation plea

Dec 11 2011 by Coreena Ford, Sunday Sun

A FORMER North writer who had a life-saving kidney transplant after he was poisoned by deadly mushrooms is urging others to donate organs, as the patron of a new charity.

Nicholas Evans, 61, began his career as a cub reporter on our sister paper the Evening Chronicle, spending years on Tyneside in the 1970s before hitting the big time with his first book, The Horse Whisperer, which sold 15 million copies.

In a dramatic plot to mirror a Hollywood movie, Nicholas and members of his family almost died after tucking into a meal made with highly toxic mushrooms he’d picked, which looked identical to edible fungi.

He, his wife Charlotte and his brother and sister-in-law, Sir Alastair and Lady Louisa Gordon-Cumming, suffered a near-fatal reaction after eating the deadly webcap mushroom in 2008, and they needed five hours of daily dialysis to counter kidney failure ever since.

Last summer, when his heart began to fail after waiting three years on the transplant list, the writer finally gave in to his daughter Lauren’s plea to accept one of her kidneys.

Now well on the road to recovery, Nicholas has become patron of the newly-founded charity Give a kidney - One’s Enough, which encourages people to make the donation of a kidney to a stranger.