Colorado Man Receives ‘Christmas Miracle Kidney’ After Autoimmune Disease Left Him ‘Down to My Last Couple of Hours’

“They had already brought a chaplain in on the phone,” Scott Lee said

Scott Lee. Credit :The National Kidney Registry

NEED TO KNOW

Scott Lee of Colorado received a life-saving kidney donation just before the holidays
He has been fighting the rare autoimmune disease Goodpasture syndrome for 20 years
“I was down to my last couple of hours; they had already brought a chaplain in on the phone,” he said of his condition prior to the kidney transplant

A man in Colorado received a kidney donation just before the holidays.

Scott Lee has been fighting Goodpasture syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease in which the body’s antibodies attack the kidneys and lungs, for 20 years. Now, he has received a life-saving “Christmas miracle” in the form of a kidney transplant.

According to CBS KKTV 11 News, Lee was very close to death when he received his kidney donation. “I was down to my last couple of hours; they had already brought a chaplain in on the phone,” he told the outlet.

Scott Lee.The National Kidney Registry

KKTV 11 reported that the man had previously been in a coma for a month, and had also undergone multiple years of dialysis and a failed kidney transplant. “I lost the front half of my foot, then it went to my hip, lost my hip,” Lee recounted.

Eventually, Lee was told he had one last chance to get a kidney — but it had to be from a living donor. According to Lee, he had less than a 1% chance of finding a match, and his own sons weren’t viable donors.

Lee then joined the National Kidney Registry — and that’s when his friend Julie McVicker thought to herself, “I had to try.”

Despite her efforts, McVicker, a church friend, discovered that she wasn’t a match for Lee. However, she was able to help Lee out anyway. She ended up donating her kidney to another person, which allowed Lee to get a living donor voucher — securing him priority access to a compatible kidney.

Later, Lee got a match for a kidney transplant. “She gave up a body part for me, and in turn I got a body part from somebody else,” Lee told KKTV 11 of McVicker.

Lee recently had a successful kidney transplant, saying it was “literally a Christmas miracle.”

Currently in recovery, Lee says he’s “so happy that I get to watch my granddaughters grow up, ’cause I was worried I wasn’t going to get to.”

Lee also spoke highly of his relationship with McVicker. “We are supposed to take care of each other, and when you have that opportunity, you need to do it, so I was lucky I got to, and now she’s part of the family whether she likes it or not. She’s stuck with us,” he said.

Scott Lee.The National Kidney Registry

Lee was diagnosed with Goodpasture Syndrome at age 37 in 2005, per his page on the National Kidney Registration. The disorder, per the Mayo Clinic, occurs when one’s body produces proteins that attach to collagen in parts of the lungs and kidneys because it views collagen as foreign. As a result, it can cause inflammation and destroy those organs.

Lee spoke about his failed kidney transplant in 2020, and said it came after he spent six years on the donor list. The man contracted COVID while in recovery, and the organ was removed about one month after the transplant. Doctors later found that the kidney was covered in a fungus.

He said he then spent two years battling the fungal infection, “which cost me a partial amputation of my right foot, total hip replacement, arterial bypass surgeries, and numerous tubes and drains coming out of my body.”

Lee works as a construction worker and is an “avid outdoorsman.”

“This has not just had an enormous impact on my life, but also my wife and two fine boys lives. My wife is an absolute angel for all she has done for me and the things she has sacrificed,” he wrote at the time.