Marriage Fell Apart Post Transplant

You want a piece of me? A UK wife is answering ‘heck yeah’ to that question, telling her estranged husband she wants to repossess the kidney she donated to him before allegedly discovering he was cheating with a friend of hers and engaging in sex chats online. She admits that there were warning signs during their courtship, but

According to London’s Sunday People, 41-year-old suburban mom Samantha Lamb doesn’t want the kidney back for her own use. She would simply like to give the organ to someone she believes to be more deserving.

Lamb claims that, shortly after she and her husband went through the transplant operation in 2012, she discovered he was cheating with a friend of hers. After she confronted him, she says Andy Lamb, 45, packed up and left. It was only then that Lamb says she learned the full extent of her hubby’s extracurricular activities, unearthing evidence of the racy chats he had been engaging in online.

This isn’t the first time a divorcing spouse has had post-separation organ-donation remorse. A few years ago a divorcing New York surgeon announced to the press that he wanted to repo his kidney from his cheating wife. The alternative? He would let her keep it, he said, in exchange for the tidy sum of $1.5 million.

So, are these twin tales a sign that you shouldn’t donate an organ to a spouse you’re not sure about it? Perhaps. More likely, though, this particular story simply highlights a larger trend we’re all familiar with: reality TV can kill marriages.

You see, Mr. and Mrs. Lamb were being filmed for a BBC documentary as they prepped for and recovered from the transplant. The limelight, Mrs. Lamb seems to think, held a little too much appeal for her spouse. As her post-op hubby shaved to look good for the cameras, she says, she realized she might have made a mistake. After she pointed this out to her husband, she recalls that he became moody and resentful — even asking her to never bring up the transplant again. “I’m sure the anger was caused by guilt. He’d spend hours on his laptop and then pick a fight that would end with him leaving for hours.”

For his part, Andy Lamb tells Sunday People that he never wanted his wife’s organ; it was too much of a risk. “But she insisted and I’ll always owe her my life,” he’s quoted as saying. And Lamb denies the cheating accusations as well. “Despite what Samantha believes, I’ve never been with her friend. I just helped train her dog.”