To back track a little bit, about the same time I was friends with Allison, I also had another friend named Angie. Angie was also an ACORN! As a matter of fact, many years later, her mother was my nurse when I gave birth to my daughter, Blake. Eric, the other ACORN, and I were friends way back then too, but the difference is, I am still friends with Eric and I have lost Angie in the course of time. I remember very clearly the last time I saw her, which was at Utah Park, here in A Town, at a free concert. That was probably 10 years ago and Angie had just received a kidney transplant. She was having a hard time with the transplant not to mention numerous problems due to all the fall out on every aspect of life that goes with having kidney disease. She gave me her phone number that night, and I called her a few times, but we never really re-connected. I don't think she really wanted to hear from me and I eventually gave up on calling.
It would have been special to donate a kidney to someone I know, but really hard too.
Later on, but not much later, a neighbor friend of mine has a husband who received a donor kidney. No one even knew he needed a one. But the joy he showed after receiving the transplant and her joy was immediate and real. She explained to me later that he had a really good match in his donor. There are lots of factors to help transplants do well and being a close match is one of them. One advantage to living altruistic donors is that the transplant team can test for matches in many different factors, which makes the tranplant easier for the recipient's body to accept.
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