Made In Chelsea star Sam Vanderpump has revealed he turned down his mother's offer to donate a part of her liver, explaining that he did not want to subject her to the impact of his liver disease. The 29-year-old suffers from congenital hepatic fibrosis of the liver and polycystic kidney disease, and now has end-stage liver disease, requiring a transplant to survive.
Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain, Vanderpump said: 'That first kind of instinct that my mum had, and other members of my family and friends, was “we want to help you, we want to”, and my first reaction is, “no, I’ve got this illness, why would I want to subject a loved one to this disease?”' He agreed with presenter Susanna Reid that the rejection stemmed from a fear of something going wrong during his mother's part of the donation process.
However, Vanderpump noted that learning more about live donor safety changed his perspective. He said: 'As we’ve learned more, and you learn a lot more in the documentary that actually the risk to a live donor is actually so minimal they would only accept 20% of live donors that would volunteer, because the absolute amount of testing they go through to make sure that there are no risks. And testament to that, in the UK, we’ve had no fatalities from live donors.'
Vanderpump appeared on the programme with his wife Alice, a model, who revealed that his brother is currently undergoing testing to become a live donor. The couple welcomed their first child, Marmaduke, earlier this year. Alice said it was 'hard to hear' him reject his mother's offer, but added that expecting a baby changed her perspective: 'If I ever looked back in the past and thought, “oh, we didn’t look at an option that could have helped Sam”, and something went wrong, I would have really hated myself for it.'
Vanderpump, who also runs finance companies in the UK and Dubai and was previously a racing driver, is the nephew of Lisa Vanderpump of The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills fame. He will star in Made In Chelsea: Sam Vanderpump's Story on E4 at 9pm on Tuesday.
