Rockford's greatest golfer Brad Benjamin needs help from a living kidney donor
As a young pro, Rockford’s greatest golfer ran into a series of nagging injuries. Later, he began to hurt even when he wasn’t injured.
“In my late 20s, I used to run a couple of miles a day, but I started to notice some difficulty in recovering from workouts and golf,” Brad Benjamin said. “I thought my body was slowly wearing down.”
That wasn’t it. It was probably the same thing that made his mouth taste metallic several years later.
“I had my wife buy me new toothpaste,” Benjamin said. “I couldn’t figure it out. I could tell something was up, but it wasn’t alarming.”
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It became alarming over Thanksgiving week in 2022. Benjamin, who now lives in South Carolina, his wife and their two young kids were back in the Rockford area visiting her parents when he began getting migraine headaches. Also at that time, a spot in his left eye grew much worse. He visited an optometrist, who noticed pressure behind the eye that caused bruising. His blood pressure was over 200. He was sent to the hospital for more tests.
“I thought I had COVID,” said Benjamin, the only golfer in Rockford history to make the cut at the U.S. Open and to qualify for The Masters. “I took a test. I was hoping it was going to be positive,. With all the symptoms, I was fearful it could have been even worse than what this is.”
Benjamin, 37, somehow is somewhat thankful that he “only” has IgA nephropathy, also known as Berger disease. Even though he needed five surgeries after the disease was discovered. And still needs a new kidney.
A living kidney.
“My doctors have been adamant that with my overall health and age, it’s best to find a living donor,” Benjamin said. “With a deceased donor, those kidneys tend to last eight to 10 years. A living donor is at least double that. Maybe 20 or 30 years. Maybe your whole life.”
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With over 100,000 people in the U.S. currently on a list to receive kidneys, there is between a three- and five-year wait. And that’s just for a deceased donor kidney. It’s much harder to get one from a live donor.
“You have to put the word out there and hope that people apply to be a living donor,” Benjamin said. “If I can find somebody who is brave enough to donate a kidney, I can get back to a full, normal life. And if I do it sooner rather than later, it’s not going to have an impact on the rest of my body.
“But the sooner the better. You never know what’s going to happen down the road with this affecting other organs.”
Benjamin, a Guilford grad who is the son of former longtime Rock Valley College golf coach Steve Benjamin, last entered a professional min-tour golf event in May of 2021. At the time of that North Carolina tourney, he was battling through another one of his myriad injuries, this time an elbow issue that he wound up having surgery on.
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“I was in severe pain. I probably shouldn’t have been playing. I somehow made the cut, but every shot I hit was painful. I regret doing it.”
Benjamin started a business making custom putters over a decade ago and works from home. That makes it a little more convenient to deal with his daily peritoneal dialysis, which pumps three liters of fluid into his body — making him weigh an extra 4 ½ pounds.
“The solution goes in and draws out the toxins in your blood and then I have to drain it out,” Benjamin said. “At night I hook up to a machine and it does all the hard work.
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“The exchanges only take 15 minutes to do, but that solution has to stay inside for 3 ½ hours. I certainly don’t feel like my old self. My stamina and strength aren’t the same. But I am able to do almost any daily task that I need to do.
“All things considered, I am pretty lucky given the diagnosis I had.”
Benjamin takes six medications a day. After so many stops and starts, the pro golf career is now over for the only Rockford golfer to win the Illinois Open, a man who once shot 65 at Bethpage Black in the opening round of the U.S. Open, and a man who set five local golf records in three weeks in 2009.
“The last six years have been a time warp,” Benjamin said. “I thought my 20s went by quick. But my last six years — I strained my back really bad, then the COVID year, then my elbow acted up — I haven’t been able to do anything that I wanted to accomplish.”
But if his life as a pro golfer is over, his life as a husband to Rikki and father to Palmer, 6, and Lincoln, 2, is still in its beginning phases.
But in need of a huge and generous assist from an unknown healthy kidney donor.
“I don’t need to have somebody be a direct match to help me,” Benjamin said. “As long as they are healthy, willing and able, they have an exchange program developed by a Nobel Prize-winning economist (Alvin Roth). You just have to hope and pray you find someone brave enough to do it.”
How to donate a kidney
Brad Benjamin's date of birth: 09/21/1986
MUSC Living Donor Program Website: https://muschealth.org/medical.../transplant/living-donation
Contact MUSC Living Donor Program: 843-792-5097
Complete MUSC Living Kidney Donor Form: https://redcap.musc.edu/surveys/?s=DTER8M8JLM
Contact: mtrowbridge@rrstar.com, @matttrowbridge or 815-987-1383. Matt Trowbridge has covered sports for the Rockford Register Star for over 30 years, after previous stints in North Dakota, Delaware, Vermont and Iowa City
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Rockford golfing great Brad Benjamin in search of kidney donor
