Holding out for a hero

An online encounter led to a deeper connection for Kaye Menadue and Brad Taylor, and both found that love is worth the wait.

Kaye Menadue smiles as she remembers the tagline, ‘Holding out for a hero!’, she chose for her profile on match.com, an internet dating agency. She admits she wasn’t really expecting to find one, but her brothers had coerced the 36-year-old South Australian primary school teacher into registering. “My youngest brother met his wife through the website, but I didn’t really think it would do anything for me,” Kaye remembers. “I guess I hoped that something would happen, but I didn’t want to set myself up for disappointment.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of Adelaide, Brad Taylor had also been logging on to match.com. Brad had nine months of online chatting under his belt and, although he hadn’t come across a soul mate, he had made countless friends. Brad had been plagued by illness throughout his childhood, so there hadn’t been much time for making friends, let alone girlfriends. “By the time I was well enough to have a social life I was thirty years old,” he explains. “I could finally go to pubs and clubs, but I had no social skills. I hadn’t learned that sort of thing.”

Now 41, Brad had been diagnosed with chronic cystic fibrosis when he was just a baby. “Back then, if you were chronic, doctors thought it was a waste of time and money to try to treat you. I wasn’t expected to survive,” he says. “When I was six I was still kicking, but my lungs were a lot worse and I realised that I would be dead by the age of ten. I was angry that I was going to die young – I wanted to play sport and do all the other things normal kids do. So when I turned seven, my birthday wish was to be around one day when there was a cure or some form of treatment.”

Brad defied the odds and made it to his 24th birthday, but his lungs were only working at 24 per cent capacity and he had heart failure on the right side of his heart. When a doctor told him he had six months to live, Brad knew he was running out of borrowed time. He agreed to be assessed for a heart-lung transplant and underwent a series of tests, which were dangerous, as his organs were already incredibly weak.

But there was a light at the end of the tunnel: on 1 March 1990, Brad made the headlines as Australia’s first domino heart-lung transplant. A domino transplant involves a donor’s heart and lungs being transplanted into a second person whose heart, in turn, is transplanted into a third person (although Brad’s heart was damaged, it would improve if matched with a good set of lungs). Even though the transplant was a success, Brad was only given a 60 per cent chance of surviving for five years, but having beaten the odds so many times before, he chose to ignore the latest forecast.

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