Hooked Together : Angler Donates a Kidney to Save the Life of His Fishing Buddy

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 removed a kidney from Wilson and stitched it into Rembert, dramatically improving his health.

One moment, they were strangers 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.”

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

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

Although his name was on two waiting lists for transplants, there was no telling when he would find a donor. To prevent impurities from building up in his blood, he had to undergo three-hour dialysis sessions three days a week.

“He had chronic renal failure,” said Dr. Robert Mendez, who eventually performed the transplant. “He was not doing very well.”

“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.

Wilson, who lived in Hermosa Beach--he has since moved to Lomita--often went to the municipal pier to angle for bonito, mackerel and whatever other fish were biting. Rembert, who lives in Windsor Hills, often went there on the days he wasn’t undergoing 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 owner of a demolition business.

Wilson said he learned of his new fishing partner’s medical problems when he noticed a bulge on Rembert’s left forearm and asked what it was. Rembert explained that twin tubes had been implanted for dialysis.

The thought of becoming a donor came to him two days after they met, Wilson said. He was chatting with Frank Petron, manager of a snack bar and tackle shop at the end of the 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.”

The next day, he told Rembert he would be tested to see if he qualified as a donor. “I had to do it,” he said.

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

Kimberly Wilson, traumatized 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 sudden infant death syndrome. Then, in early 1986, her father died of a heart attack.

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

“I told him I thought about leaving him,” she said.

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

But the doctor and wife both eventually relented.

Kimberly said she had a revelation of sorts while waiting at a Hermosa Beach stop sign. She noticed a bumper sticker on the car in front: “Kidney Donors Save Lives.”

“I said, ‘Somebody’s trying to tell me something,’ ” she recalled.

Mendez said screening interviews over several months convinced him that Wilson’s motives were altruistic.

Even so, Wilson and Rembert fibbed a bit. To avoid arousing suspicion, they told 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 three-hour operation--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 20 years, pronounced it a success.

Rembert still doesn’t know when he will return to work, but he’s back up to 185 pounds, from a low of 165, and feels far stronger than before the operation.

Wilson’s recovery has been slow. He still has pain on his left side, along the incision. He’s also absorbing the $270 per week difference between his regular salary and disability pay until he can return to work, which he hopes to do this month.

But Wilson 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.”

Rembert said of his friend’s gift: “I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”