From his Toronto hospital rehab bed, Peterborough’s Ken Sharp says he feels blessed; he feels lucky. Now he just wants to come home.
It’s been almost two months since Sharp underwent his third kidney transplant in the past 43 years, and he says that he hasn’t felt this well in a long time.

“I’m a lucky man,” he said. “I beat the rap.”

Sharp’s condition has given him some notoriety, not just in Peterborough but across Canada. A longtime advocate for the creation of an artificial kidney, he was also Canada’s longest living transplant recipient.
In recent years, however, numerous health problems pretty much forced him from the community he calls home.
Sharp grew up in the Fowler’s Corners area where his parents had a home on Chemong Lake. His kidney problems developed when he was young, and by the age of 20 he had his first kidney transplant.
“It didn’t work,” he said. “It was really rough, and they had to take the organ out. They didn’t have the knowledge and the medication like they do today.”
He’d undergo a subsequent transplant and then spend years on dialysis. Back then, he recalls, a dialysis machine was set up in his parents’ home, and his mother would help him with treatments. The treatments, given about every second day, would take six hours, he says.
Eventually, he went to Fleming College, got a trade, and worked for a plumbing service in Peterborough, undergoing treatment in the evenings.
That’s when he learned that doctors were trying to create a bio-kidney — an artificial organ that could be implanted when human transplants weren’t available.--> READ MORE