Arizona Man Gets Kidney From Ministering Brother in 5 Months

Brad Bywater sat in a wheelchair at his daughter's May 2023 high school graduation, too weak to stand and cheer. The San Tan Valley, Arizona optometrist had lived his entire life with polycystic kidney disease, but he never expected debilitating pain to arrive so soon.

By spring 2023, walking to the kitchen left him breathless. Spontaneous cyst ruptures would leave him in agony for weeks at a time.

In March, Bywater's doctor called with urgent news. His kidney function had dropped below 20, the threshold requiring a transplant.

The typical transplant waiting list takes five years. Bywater began nightly dialysis at home, tethered to a machine filtering toxins through his abdomen every night by 7:30 p.m.

Five months later, officially listed on Mayo Clinic's national transplant wait list, Bywater and his wife Angela made a single Facebook post asking people to consider getting tested as potential donors. The response overwhelmed them.

"I tried to make a list of all the people who signed up, and I lost track around 60 people," Bywater recalled through tears. "I was hoping for maybe five or six people."

One person who saw the post was Chris Runkel, assigned as the Bywaters' ministering brother through their church. Though the two barely knew each other, Runkel couldn't shake a persistent feeling.

"I kept getting that feeling to get tested," Runkel said. "I was like, 'That's crazy… I like my organs.'"

He told his wife Candee about the prompting. At a stoplight days later, Candee felt an undeniable wave of confirmation rush from her head to her feet.

"Everything is going to be perfectly OK," she recalled hearing. The Runkels decided to move forward with Mayo Clinic's rigorous testing process.

Going through the tests, Chris felt certain he would match. "I felt like it was predestined to happen," he said.

When the news came that he was compatible, Candee called Angela in tears. "How do you thank someone for that kind of sacrifice?" Angela remembered thinking.

Brad was between optometry patients when he got the call from his wife. He took a few moments to compose himself, filled with gratitude and disbelief.

Sunny's Take

Most kidney transplant patients spend years on dialysis waiting for a match. Bywater spent just four months before receiving Chris Runkel's kidney in September 2023 at Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix.

The surgery succeeded. Two near-strangers, connected through a church assignment, became bonded for life through an extraordinary act of generosity.

What started as a simple ministering assignment became a miracle neither family will ever forget.