Batting for a full recovery

Local man Darren Van Der Hoff has been selected on a national cricket team less than a year after receiving a kidney donation from his wife.

Mr Van Der Hoff lived for four and a half years with failed kidneys before letting his wife Fiona donate one of hers in July 2007.

Last month he received an invitation to play for the Australian Transplant Cricket Club in a series against England this October.

Before his transplant Mr Van Der Hoff was forced to spend 20 hours every week hooked up to a dialysis machine to keep him alive while he waited for a dead donor.

Even while on dialysis Mr Van Der Hoff kept playing cricket with the Corrimal Cougars, but it was tough going.

Despite being told by doctors he would miss the 07-08 cricket season, the keen batsman talked his club into letting him get back onto the field.

“Originally I was told I wouldn’t play at all that coming season and (the club) said they would have to look at medical clearances, which I accepted,” Mr Van Der Hoff told the Wollongong and Northern Leader last week.

“But then I started walking and gradually talked them round to maybe playing after Christmas.

“I ended up playing the first game of the season – and I played it only about three months after I had received the kidney transplant.

“I would say that I probably wasn’t quite up to standard – but I was determined.”

Mr Van Der Hoff was very excited when he got the invite to play with the ATCC team against an English national squad that is also entirely made up of transplant patients.

He said that, for the first time, he was envied for something that had resulted from his debilitating condition.

“One of my friends said to me ‘I wish I didn’t have a kidney so I could play for Australia,” he said.

However with half of the series being played in Perth he is going to have to secure some donations or sponsorship to help him financially.

Mr Van Der Hoff said he has been told the competition is ‘taken very seriously’ and has to get back into training throughout the off-season to get up to scratch.

In the first six months since receiving his new kidney Mr Van Der Hoff put on 20 kilograms and sometimes gained as much as two kilograms a week.