Torrington (AP) — Mike Wallace's urgent need for a new kidney may have saved Tim Sparks' life.

Wallace, 52, who owns Southworth's Wayside Furniture, has suffered from kidney disease for a dozen years. For nearly three years, he has endured nightly peritoneal dialysis, hooked to a machine in his home from midnight to 9:15 a.m.

Three months ago, Wallace's name was added to the wait list for a kidney transplant at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Sparks, 56, a Bantam native who moved to Watertown in August, read an article about Wallace, which mentioned his love of motorcycles. It is a passion Sparks shares.

"Maybe it was the motorcycle connection. For some reason, it just got to me," said Sparks last week, as he stood in the driveway of Wallace's home looking over a faded red 1983 Audi GT car that Wallace had just picked up for $800. The two also appreciate sporty cars.

At the point Sparks saw the article, Wallace had a tough summer. He'd been hospitalized for pancreatitis, and had his gall bladder removed. The donor wait list was a stark reminder that his kidneys will never get better.

Sparks decided he should try to help.

"It took me a few days to decide. It keep eating away it me. I was just thinking of what it would be like to have to go through something like that," he said.

He conferred with his wife, Kathy Sparks. "She was a little hesitant at first," he said. By the time he made up his mind, "I had her full support."

Sparks called the Yale-New Haven Hospital Donor Hotline and started the screening process.

Potential donors agree to an extensive medical workup. People with high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, high body mass, a viral infection or who currently abuse drugs or alcohol are routinely excluded from donating.

Candidates are seen and evaluated by multiple members of the transplant team before being approved for donation.

Doctors determined Sparks might be a match for Wallace. "They called and said everything looked really good," he said.

The donor process is anonymous, so Wallace had no idea there might be hope.

Then Joyce Albert, who coordinates the program for donors offering a kidney, called. Doctors had found a cyst on Sparks' kidney — which is common — but an MRI was required.

Two weeks after the MRI, Albert called again.

"By her voice, I knew something was up," Sparks said.

Sparks and his sister, Kim Sparks an operating room nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital, went the next morning to hear the results.

The MRI revealed a tumor, likely malignant.

Sparks was off the donor list, and facing his own health scare.

Surgery, and soon, is required, the doctors told him.

"If this tumor proves to be a malignancy, this would be a life-saving event for him," Albert said.

Should the tumor prove malignant, it is of a variety of cancer that is slow-growing, and often rarely detected early enough to stop easily.

"Most of the time when it happens, it has grown, and patients have symptoms," Albert said.

Sparks described the news as "a big letdown."

"I was like the perfect candidate, the perfect donor," he said.

And for Wallace, learning that a donor was so close has been unsettling.

"I tend to go toward the side of 'Good for him!' that he found out," Wallace said. "If he didn't do this, he could be in big trouble."

Sparks wanted to share his story in the hopes of more publicity for Wallace, and others who need donors. The two men met, and Wallace learned what Sparks had tried to do for him, after Sparks decided to go public with what happened.

"You've got to be positive," Wallace said. "I'm always positive. You can't get frustrated. You allow yourself to do that, you lose."

His health lately has been "semi-stable," Wallace said.

"You just don't know when things are going to happen. There's going to be a point where you crash and burn again. You just don't know," he said.

Albert said there are more than 1,200 people in Connecticut awaiting a new kidney. The normal wait time for a kidney, depending on blood type, is two to six years.

Sparks met with a surgeon on Nov. 24 and plans to schedule surgery as soon as possible. If the tumor proves not to be cancer, he said, he plans to ask if he might return to the donor list.

"I would consider it," he said.