Gold Coast nurse awaits third kidney transplant while saving lives on dialysis

Daniel Hoepner moves through the Gold Coast University Hospital in scrubs, responding to emergencies, steadying frightened patients, doing the work of a clinical nurse consultant. What most of them don't know is that he is also waiting for a kidney—his third one—while his own blood is filtered six hours at a time, every other day, through a machine.

He is thirty years old. He was born with congenital nephrotic syndrome of the Finnish type, a genetic disorder that causes the kidneys to leak protein into the urine at catastrophic rates. The body swells. The kidneys fail. Without dialysis and transplantation, the condition is fatal. His mother noticed something was wrong within days of his birth. "I was just like a little football, really swollen," he recalls. Doctors initially dismissed the swelling as the harmless plumpness of a healthy infant. They were wrong.

Hoepner began dialysis as a baby and stayed on it until he was six years old, when his stepfather donated one of his kidneys. That transplant worked. It gave him more than sixteen years of relative health—enough time to finish university, to start a nursing career, to build a life that looked, from the outside, like anyone else's. Then it began to fail. Just as he was establishing himself professionally, his body turned against him again.

His mother wanted to donate a kidney to her son, but she was not a compatible match. Instead, she entered the Australia and New Zealand paired kidney exchange program, donating her kidney to a stranger. In return, Hoepner received a compatible kidney from another donor through the same system. That second transplant sustained him for years. Now it too is failing, and he has returned to the waiting list.

This time, his partner has stepped forward to donate. But Hoepner does not know when a suitable kidney will become available, or if his partner's kidney will be the one. In the meantime, he continues to work full-time. He has learned to be organized, to listen to his body, to make the most of the time he has. "I definitely don't make it known to patients," he said of his condition. "I think they've got enough going on to not be worrying about their nurse being unwell." He discovered, too, that staying idle made him more tired. Work gave him purpose and structure when his body was failing.

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, just over one thousand kidney transplants were performed across Australia in 2024. But receiving three or more transplants remains extraordinarily rare. Natasha Rogers, head of transplantation at Westmead Hospital, noted that only about one to two percent of kidney transplant recipients ever receive a third organ. "It's pretty unusual," she said. She also called Hoepner's ability to continue working while on dialysis "impressive." Kidney disease and dialysis are themselves a full-time job—labor-intensive, exhausting, relentless.

Hoepner has spent his entire life in and out of hospitals. He has endured the failure of two transplanted organs. He faces the possibility of a third failure. Yet he speaks not of despair but of continuity. "Keep making memories, keep setting goals, and keep hoping," he said. "A transplant can give you a new chapter, but your life is still worth living today." He is waiting for that new chapter. But he is not waiting to live.