In 2018, I read a story in my local paper about a man who needed a living kidney donor, and that’s when I knew I wanted to donate my kidney someday. I decided to wait until after I gave birth to my last baby, which I did in June of 2019, so in January of 2020, I volunteered to donate my kidney, naming the local man as my recipient.

After a lengthy delay thanks to COVID, I finally got all the testing done and was approved to donate in November 2020. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a match for the man from the newspaper, but I agreed to donate to anyone.

Then, just last month, a full year after I was approved to donate, I received a call that they had found me a match and wanted to have the procedure right away. So I got busy organizing childcare, pet care, and my own post-op care.

It turned out that I would be the start of a chain of donations that would allow several people [at least three at the time] to receive new kidneys.

The surgery ended up being pushed back once, but then on 11/30/2021, I underwent a nephrectomy and my left kidney was implanted into the recipient.

It is a privilege to be healthy enough to do this for someone and I’m grateful to the excellent transplant center nurses, surgeons, and medical team who took such great care of me.

If you have any questions about living kidney donation, please feel free to ask! I will be posting with more detail about the process of donating and the recovery from donating in the future.

❤️

Karis