Made In Chelsea star Sam Vanderpump has said he refused his mother’s offer of a liver donation as he did not want to subject her to the impact of his liver disease.
The 29-year-old has the rare conditions congenital hepatic fibrosis of the liver and polycystic kidney disease, and now has end-stage liver disease meaning he will need a transplant in order to stay alive.
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 went on to agree with presenter Susanna Reid that the reason he rejected his mother’s offer of a liver donation was because he did not want to cope with anything going wrong during her part of the donation process.
Vanderpump added: “You’ve hit the nail on the head. 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, so it was something I learned recently, and that’s what started to turn my head to maybe accepting and maybe looking into this idea.”
He appeared on the morning programme with his wife Alice, who is a model, who revealed Vanderpump’s brother was currently going through testing to look at the possibility of becoming a live donor.
The pair announced the birth of their first child, Marmaduke, earlier this year, and Alice said it was “hard to hear” him reject his mother’s offer of a donation.
She said: “I could also relate, because I’d feel the same if I was in his situation, but because we were expecting a baby, it then changed my perspective even more.
“Because you do think about the worst-case scenario sometimes, and you try not to hold on to that thought, but you have to make decisions in the moment that will (be good for your family).
“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.”
As well as starring on the Channel 4 reality show, Vanderpump also runs finance companies in the UK and Dubai and was previously a racing driver.
He is the nephew of Lisa Vanderpump, known for The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills and her own spin-off programmes such as Vanderpump Rules.
Vanderpump will star in Made In Chelsea: Sam Vanderpump’s Story on E4 at 9pm on Tuesday.
