DENVER — Mark McIntosh relies on a machine to keep him alive.
Every night, he connects the catheter in his abdomen to a peritoneal dialysis machine that will pump multiple cycles of fluid through his body overnight, filtering out the toxins. His kidneys can no longer do the job themselves.
“I do this every night,” McIntosh said. “Me and my machine, we’re good buds every night for about 8 hours.”
McIntosh, a former Denver sports broadcaster, author, and speaker, was diagnosed about a year ago with a disorder called amyloidosis.
“Your plasma proteins club together and attack your vital organs," he said. "It can go after your heart, your lungs, your liver, your nervous system, your kidneys. It could go after all of them — and it went after my kidneys.”
He spent several months receiving dialysis at a facility outside his home, before being able to transition to a home-based, overnight treatment. But there’s only one solution that can free McIntosh from this daily routine.
“That would be a kidney transplant,” he said, with a knowing smile.
McIntosh now joins the tens of thousands of Americans waiting for a kidney, and working as their own advocate to try and find one.
In this process, McIntosh has connected with many others in the organ donation world: fellow patients, former transplant recipients and even donors. These connections have led to a new project he hopes will make a real difference — not just in his life but in the lives of so many other people in need of a new organ.
“We’re trying to create good content that educates people,” McIntosh said. He's leaning into his journalism background to launch a new effort called “Drive For Five” to ambitiously recruit 5,000 living kidney donors. The idea was born out of a challenge from a friend in his Bible study: rather than find one kidney donor, he wants to find thousands.
“You can share your spare, you can save a life, you can leave a priceless legacy," McIntosh said. "So here we are… months into this, and we’re just trying to raise awareness, trying to make a difference.”
McIntosh has teamed up with a few of his new connections, like double-transplant recipient, Randy Weber.
“I feel absolutely fantastic, I feel better than I have in easily a decade or more,” Weber said. “Receiving the organ transplants I got — absolutely saved my life. And I feel like I’m in life 2.0.”
In the 1990s, Randy Weber was traveling the world as a professional athlete, an Olympic ski-jumper who grew up in Steamboat Springs. But in 2016, he was diagnosed with a vascular disease that led to kidney failure. Weber learned he had to be his own advocate, just like McIntosh is doing now.
“It came down to my total lack of embarrassment talking about kidney failure and, better or worse, I had to have a kidney transplant — and I asked everybody,” Weber said.
Two people answered the call: Weber’s own brother and a family friend. He knows he’s one of the lucky ones.
“If you're waiting on the list, you're going to die on the list. I don't say that to be cruel, it's just the reality we’re in,” he said.
The Drive for Five team is specifically targeting older adults, ages 45-60, who are in good health but past their child-bearing years and curious about donation. They love the idea of finding more Olympians, former athletes, military veterans and even former sorority and fraternity members — people who are passionate and driven, service-oriented, or simply looking for a way to give back.
People just like Crissy Perham.
“Sometimes when a door opens and you have an opportunity, you go through it because you can!” Perham said with a smile during a Zoom call with Weber and McIntosh in March.
Like Weber, Perham is a former athlete. An Olympic swimmer, she took home three medals during the 1992 Barcelona Games. But it was her 2022 kidney donation to the father of a fellow Olympic swimmer — Dick Franklin, the father of Missy Franklin — that she said defines her legacy.
“I think it’s something that’s going to last more than me,” Perham said. "If it's something you’re really moved by, you’ll go forward and you won’t be sorry that you did it.”
As the donor, Perham said her recovery was pretty easy. She said she was back to Cross Fit six weeks after her donation, and other than increasing the amount of water she drinks and monitoring her sodium intake, she said her day-to-day life hasn’t changed.
“Once you do it once, doesn't feel like a big deal. Everything is back to normal for me, but then I keep crossing paths with people, like Randy [Weber], where it’s made a huge difference in his life," Perham said. "To have an opportunity to help others, help a friend like Mark [McIntosh], this is just the icing on the cake of something I already felt pretty proud of.”
“I want to see an end to the waitlist,” Weber said. “I want to see it before my time here is up.”
“Obviously, selfishly, I want to stay alive,” McIntosh added. “I got a lot to do still. But I just kind of feel like I’m on assignment, to steal a journalistic term, to go out and help others find live donors.”
Brought together by their kidney journeys, they hope to move the needle for future transplant recipients.
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