Published: October 05, 2009 12:05 am      

‘I’d made a promise’: Former Cambria officer gives kidney to fiancee

A police officer who used to patrol the streets of several Cambria County communities has given a second chance at life to the woman he plans to spend the rest of his life with.

Brett Lysinger, a 1998 graduate of Bishop Carroll High School and former police officer in South Fork, Portage and Cresson boroughs and Summerhill Township, has donated one of his kidneys to his fiancee, Ashley Campbell.

For Lysinger, 29, now living and working as a full-time police officer in Chestertown, Md., giving up a kidney was the only way he could rescue Campbell from the three days a week, three hours a day dialysis she had to endure.

“The first time I met her, she told me about her problems,” Lysinger said in an interview from his home near northern Maryland’s eastern shore.

“I said I’d check it out to see if I was a match,” he said.

That was in early 2008, three years after Lysinger pulled up stakes, leaving his local police work and full-time job as a dispatcher at the Cambria County 911 center and relocated to Maryland for something he really loves – law enforcement.

He endured a full year of testing at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore and admits to being taken aback when doctors said his kidney should work just fine for Campbell.

“I never expected in a million years I’d be a match. But they said there was no doubt I was a match,” Lysinger said. “I never had a second thought. There was no way I was going to back out; I’d made a promise.”

The surgery to remove one of his kidneys and transplant it into Campbell took place July 16 in a double procedure which went as expected, doctors told the couple.

Lysinger was off work for about four weeks.

In six weeks, Campbell was back to the job in guest relations at the Comfort Suites in Chestertown.

Campbell said she has no idea how her kidneys failed three years ago, but one day she was fine and the next she was in the hospital looking at double failure with a life of dialysis.

Speculation is that when Campbell – at age 14 – contracted a bad case of streptococcus, responsible for a wide variety of infections, the damage may have resulted. No one knows for sure.

“I never had kidney infections, I don’t know how my kidneys failed,” she said. “But I know I love him. He’s everything to me. He’s my soul mate.”

The couple plan to wed April 10 in Portage.

“He gave me life. He did what he wanted to do, and we’re all grateful to him,” Campbell said of Lysinger.