Astounding Act : A Fisherman Saves the Life of His New Friend--by Donating a Kidney

Frank Rembert remembers accidentally pricking his left index finger with a fishhook just before he got to know Rick Wilson on the Hermosa Beach pier. Wilson offered him a bandage, and the pair began talking and fishing together.

Three days later, Wilson offered Rembert one of his kidneys.

The astounding act of generosity surprises both men even now, more than two months after doctors cut a kidney out of Wilson and stitched it into Rembert, dramatically improving his health.

One moment, they were strangers getting acquainted--just fishing and chewing the fat. The next, Wilson had resolved to put his life on the line for his new-found friend.

“I just had this driving force to help that man,” said Wilson, 37, a husband and father of two daughters. “I don’t know why I had no reservations. To me it still seems insane.”

Said Rembert, 54, a husband and father of one son: “It goes to show you, miracles do happen.”

When he met Wilson last September, Frank Rembert, an airport skycap on long-term disability, was certainly a man in need of medical help. His kidneys had failed a year earlier as the result of extremely high blood pressure.

Although his name was on two waiting lists for kidney transplants, there was no telling when he would find a donor. To prevent impurities from building up in his blood, doctors hooked him up to a dialysis machine for three hours, three days a week.

But Rembert was still sick, his weight and strength remaining far below normal. According to Dr. Robert Mendez, who eventually performed the transplant: “He had chronic renal failure. He was not doing very well.”

And to have one’s life revolve around a dialysis machine was torture. “I was a slave to that machine,” Rembert said. “I could only drink 32 ounces of water a day, and there were a lot of foods I couldn’t eat. . . . And I couldn’t do anything on the days I had dialysis, I felt so weak.”

Enter Wilson, a machinist in a Torrance metalworking plant, a part-time apartment building administrator and a volunteer Santa Claus at local hospitals during the Christmas season.

Wilson, who lived in Hermosa Beach at the time--he has since moved to Lomita--often went to the municipal pier to angle for bonito, mackerel and whatever other fish were biting. Unbeknown to him, he and Rembert, who lives in Windsor Hills, had fished at the pier for months before they met.

“We only met when I needed him,” said Rembert, who often visited the pier on the days he wasn’t having dialysis. “That’s what makes me think there must have been some kind of (divine) intervention.”

Wilson recalled that on the day their paths crossed, he noticed a bulge on Rembert’s left forearm and asked what it was. Rembert explained that twin tubes had been implanted in his flesh so that blood could be withdrawn, filtered and returned during dialysis.

From the start, the two men hit it off, swapping stories about their families and careers--Wilson about his days as a struggling country and Western drummer, Rembert about his days as the owner of a demolition business.

So after learning about Rembert’s medical ordeal, Wilson said, the decision to become a donor was surprisingly easy to make. The thought first struck him two days after they met. He was talking to Frank Petron, manager of a snack bar and tackle shop at the end of Hermosa Beach pier.

“We were talking about Rembert and his wife, about what good people they were, when it just dawned on me,” Wilson said. “I went home, and I just kept thinking about it and couldn’t get it off my mind.”

The next day, he told Rembert that he would be tested to determine whether he qualified as a donor. “It was just something that had to be done,” he said. “I had to do it. He was the nicest guy in the world.”

Medically, Wilson qualified. But that, it turned out, was the easy part. He faced strong resistance at first from his wife, Kimberly, and, ironically, from Mendez and his kidney transplant team.

Kimberly Wilson, stung by a string of family tragedies, feared losing her husband. In 1984, Wilson broke his back, a leg and an arm in a motorcycle accident. Six weeks later, the couple lost a 6-week-old daughter to crib death. Then, in early 1986, Kimberly Wilson’s father died of a heart attack at 54.

“I kept trying and trying to persuade him not to do it,” said Kimberly Wilson, 32. She was incensed--and rightfully so, Wilson concedes--that her husband did not consult her before making his decision.

“I told him I thought about leaving him,” she said. “I couldn’t believe he was making such a major decision without me.”

Mendez, meanwhile, said he first found it hard to believe that Rembert wasn’t paying Wilson under the table to become a donor, which is illegal. In addition, Mendez wanted to be certain that Wilson understood that transplant operation entailed all the risks of major surgery and would leave him with one kidney.

But Mendez and Kimberly Wilson eventually relented.

Kimberly said she had a revelation of sorts while waiting at a Hermosa Beach stop sign two weeks before the operation. Fretting to herself about her husband’s obstinacy, she noticed a bumper sticker on the car in front of hers. It read: “Kidney Donors Save Lives.”

“It was like a light went on,” she said. “I was sitting there, thinking about how I had to leave him and how upset I was. Then I look down, and there was this bumper sticker. I said, ‘Somebody’s trying to tell me something.’ ”

Mendez said screening interviews with Wilson and Rembert over several months convinced him that the donor’s motives were altruistic.

Even so, Wilson and Rembert fibbed a bit. To avoid arousing even more suspicion, they told the doctors that they had known each other for several years.

“They most often drilled me on how long I’ve known Frank and where we fished together,” Wilson said. “So we had to collaborate stories. . . . We got pretty good stories going.”

The transplant surgery--being paid for by Medicare and by the health plan of Delta Airlines, Rembert’s employer--took place April 17 at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Los Angeles. Mendez, who has performed 2,000 kidney transplants over the last 20 years, pronounces it a success.

Rembert said he feels far stronger than before the operation and is back up to 185 pounds from a low of 165 but does not know when he will be able to return to work. Although Wilson’s recovery has been slow--he still has pain on his left side, along the incision--he said he is improving steadily and hopes to be back at work by August.

Both men describe the surgery and the screening leading up to it as the ordeal of a lifetime. Wilson, who confesses that he has never had a high pain tolerance, said nothing could have prepared him for the way he felt after the operation.

“The first thing I remember is being wheeled out of the elevator on my way back to the room,” he said. “All I could do is just moan. It hurt so damn much I couldn’t even breathe. I can’t even put into words how much it hurt.”

But he expresses no regrets.

“Anybody who hasn’t saved a life doesn’t know what it’s like,” he said. “Knowing that he would probably die otherwise, knowing that he might have been on a waiting list for years. . . . It’s a satisfaction I can’t describe.”

For his part, Rembert marvels at Wilson’s determination. He recalls something Wilson told a member of Mendez’s medical team during a screening interview.

“She kept asking: ‘Why? Why? Why?’,” Rembert said. “And he said, ‘I think that Frank is a very good person and I hate to see him go through all this pain.’ I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”