DENVER — Eric Weichselbaumer isn’t looking for sympathy. He’s looking to inspire people to consider kidney donation.
Eric has lived with a rare bleeding disorder, which intensified as he got older. He had a heart attack in his early thirties, and doctors discovered that Eric was having blood clotting issues.
“That was really the start of it. The heart attack came out of nowhere. Otherwise, very healthy,” said Eric.
A few years later, in January 2022, a blot clot the size of a baseball passed through the left ventricle of his heart. When that happened, it broke into tiny pieces that attacked most of his major organs, including his kidneys, and led to the amputation of his left leg.
“Eric had really bad blood clots. Normally you get a blood clot that's isolated to one part of your body. It was literally like every part of his body, including his heart, his kidneys,” said Dr. Hunter Moore, Eric's transplant doctor at AdventHealth Porter in Denver.
Eric's kidneys began to fail, so his wife, Amanda, decided to donate one of hers. She ended up not being a match for her husband but was a match for someone on the donor waiting list.
“I hope that I had a positive impact on the person that received my kidney and their family, and I hope that changed their life. But it also helped my family in the long run, as well, of being able to bump my husband up on the list, get him a kidney and get to where we are now,” said Amanda.
Amanda’s deed bumped Eric up on the donor list, allowing him to receive a kidney in only nine months as opposed to an average wait of three to five years.
Now, with a new kidney and a prosthetic leg, Eric is back to being a husband, father and an impressive golfer. He just gets around the course a little differently these days.
“I don’t care that I navigate it differently than others. I still navigate it,” said Eric.
Eric now competes on the U.S. Adaptive Golf Tour and is looking forward to a long future as a golfer and with his family.
“In the adaptive world, finishing the national championships, had one of my best friends on the bag, that was a neat experience. I’m really excited to continue that journey where I think I can be very competitive,” said Eric. “We'd go through two amputations before we went through anything kidney-related. So, that's just how challenging it can be for anybody experiencing end-stage renal disease, kidney failure. And that's how important it is to get these folks help to change their life."
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