Mali Thompson Bullard remembers the hard lumps on her grandfather’s inner forearm. They looked like small hills beneath his skin.

When Bullard was little, she would glide her hand along his arm. She didn’t know what the bumps were, but she knew it had something to do with Grandfather being sick.

Now Bullard’s uncle has them. And this time, Bullard, 26, can do something to help.

This week she will give her left kidney to her uncle, Glynn Sheridan, with hopes of ending years of sickness and months of the tough life of dialysis dependency. The two will travel to Rochester, Minn., for transplant surgery at the Mayo Clinic.

Sheridan, president of Sunflower Bank in Lawrence, has polycystic kidney disease. He inherited it from Stanley Sheridan, his father and Bullard’s grandfather. The disease caused hundreds, maybe thousands, of cysts to fill up his kidneys. Eventually, his kidneys stopped working.

Sheridan went on dialysis December 2, 2003 – a date he remembers well. His life changed at that point.

His mornings became earlier. Three days a week, he is at the hospital by 6 a.m. for three and a half hours of dialysis. He returns home to shower, then goes off to work.

The lumps on Sheridan’s arms are the manifestation of a fistula.

“It’s basically a vein that is forced to turn into an artery,” said Scott Solcher, a Lawrence nephrologist and one of Sheridan’s physicians. Needles are poked into the fistula and that’s the access point for treatment. They never go away.

Staying productive

Some say Sheridan is like his father. He takes his disease with a positive attitude. He doesn’t complain.

Donna Masoner, a clinical social worker at Kansas Dialysis Services, has worked with Sheridan. She said Sheridan used his dialysis time productively. He brought his laptop. He caught up on phone calls. He read the newspaper.

“He didn’t let (dialysis) stop him or put him behind,” she said.

Sheridan changed his diet. He controls his phosphorus intake, for example. That means less cheese, milk and ice cream. He carries a handful of milk-colored pills loose in his pocket. They control phosphorus levels.

Glynn Sheridan, left, will receive help fighting polycystic kidney disease this week from his niece Mali Thompson Bullard, right. Sheridan and Bullard will undergo a transplant operation this week.

He dreams of one day eating a banana split with abandon.

Family concerns

Before Sheridan went on dialysis, his niece and her brother were plotting. They would be donors if they could. Bullard’s father, John Thompson, is Sheridan’s half-brother.

Bullard didn’t ask her father for permission to give away her kidney. She simply told him she would.

“This was something she decided on her own without any kind of probing,” Thompson said.

Bullard recalled her grandfather.

Stanley Sheridan’s job as a traveling management consultant ended when his kidneys stopped functioning. There was no dialysis center in Salina where he lived, so he drove to Topeka regularly for treatment.

“I just knew that he had to drive a long way : to be healthy,” Bullard said. “I remember he was going to be cleaned.”

In the late 1970s, Stanley Sheridan received a transplanted kidney. His body rejected it. He remained on dialysis until he died of a heart attack. Those years of dialysis, his family said, are what weakened his heart.

Bullard says there is a tiny bit of selfishness in her decision to donate her kidney.

“I could not not have him in my life,” she said.

She calls the decision a “no-brainer.”

“This decision has been a more peaceful, easy one than any other big decision I’ve made in my life,” she said.

New freedoms

The transplant will not cure all of Sheridan’s health problems.

“I still have kidney disease,” he said. “I will always have kidney disease. I’m just dealing with a different kind of treatment now. It is not a cure.”

But Bullard’s gift gives Sheridan a bright future. Banana splits. Vacations to the Colorado Rockies and the Caribbean without the burden of dialysis.

“He’s a really good example of how far things have come in the treatment of kidney failure,” said Solcher, one of Sheridan’s doctors.

It is difficult for Bullard and Sheridan to put in words what they are doing. It’s hard to explain why or what it means. They stumble to find words. Their eyes well with tears.

“You can’t put that into words – what I owe her,” Sheridan said. “What do you say to somebody like that?”

Bullard doesn’t want anything extra. She wants to have her uncle around. Family is the most important thing to her.

“There’s nothing that comes before my family,” she said. “This is a part I get to play in my family.”