'We need Brad to be alive and healthy': Former Quincy councilor, 42, needs kidney

QUINCY - Lori Croall says her husband, former Ward 2 City Councilor Brad Croall, has always lived a healthy life.

He doesn't drink or smoke, she said, works out four or five days a week, runs around with his two older children and plays with his third, who was born less than a year ago.

But early last year, just after he stepped down from his 10-year run on the Quincy City Council, he started getting regular severe headaches, she said.

"On Easter Sunday, I took him to the emergency room," Lori said. "We assumed it was some kind of migraine and they'd send him home with pain medicine, but his blood pressure was through the roof, he was told he had kidney failure and they admitted him. It was completely out of the blue."

In the days that followed, Lori Croall said she learned chronic kidney disease is referred to as a "silent killer." The early stages of chronic kidney disease presents with few or no symptoms, the Mayo Clinic says, and most people don't know they have it until it has advanced.

When he left the hospital a week later, Brad Croall, who was 41 at the time, had been officially diagnosed with Stage 4 kidney disease, assumed to have been brought on by an otherwise-dormant rare kidney condition.

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"His kidney was at about 15% when we left the hospital. He managed it throughout the summer, which was lucky because I was pregnant with our third child," Lori Croall said. "His doctor kept him stable until I had the baby in August, and shortly thereafter his levels started dropping again."

When Brad Croall left the hospital, it was with the looming threat of dialysis and a spot on the nationwide kidney transplant list. An only child with a wife who has a different blood type, he's still waiting and Lori says he will soon have to start dialysis.

"Brad is a very private person and really has not been talking about it as much as I would have liked him to," Lori Croall said. "But he's finally OK with us talking about it, for no reason other than we have three young kids, including a newborn baby. We need Brad to be alive and healthy."

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The Croall family has set up an email account for those interested in finding out if they'd be a match for Brad. Lori Croall can be reached at quincykidney@gmail.com for anyone who has questions or wants to know more about the process.

Brad Croall needs a donation from someone with type O blood, but Lori encourages anyone to reach out and be tested. She has type B blood, but has signed up for the national donor list.

"I didn't even know this when I signed up, but you can do something called a donor swap," she said. "So if I donate a kidney to Mr. Smith who has B blood, and Mrs. Smith has type O blood, she can donate a kidney directly to Brad."

Those who sign up to donate can do so on a list nationally or only for Croall.

"We're all kind of born with one to use and one to spare. You can live a perfectly healthy, normal life with only one kidney," Lori said. "Living a life on dialysis is not a high quality of life, but you can live perfectly normally after donating a kidney."

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Reach Mary Whitfill at mwhitfill@patriotledger.com.

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