The Gift of Life

En español │It was a typical afternoon with my sister-in-law, Phylis: We were lounging around, still in our pajamas, glued to the TV, and talking and laughing our way through The Palm Beach Story, part of her collection of about 1,200 old movies. What was different about that day, though, was that both of us had just been discharged from Seattle's Virginia Mason Hospital after kidney surgery. Coincidence? Not at all. She had just received a kidney transplant — and I had provided the kidney.

Phylis and I first met in 1979. I had flown back to my hometown in Washington state to spend Thanksgiving with my family, and my brother, David, brought as his date this 5-foot-10 brunette with a mop of curly hair and a screwball sense of humor. We bonded instantly, and while everyone else snored off the feast, the two of us talked. And talked. When it was time for her to leave, we were almost in tears at the thought we might not ever see each other again.

Fortunately, my brother didn't let her get away; they married the following April. Though we saw each other only intermittently, we never stopped talking. But it wasn't just our easy intimacy that cemented the bond. As the years went by, I discovered what an enormous heart she has. When my parents were both in an assisted living facility, she visited them every day for four years. When I was a frazzled single mom, she often invited my three children to spend a week with her and David so I could have a break — during which she introduced them to the joy of old movies such as Casablanca, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest and countless others. Not to mention she was a mean pinochle player.

So, in the fall of 2009, when we learned that Phylis' kidneys had been damaged by diabetes, I offered one of mine on the spot. She insisted things weren't that bad, but by April 2010, she was put on dialysis — four hours a day, three days a week.

Later that month, my husband and I had the first interview with Mary Mason, the donor advocate at Seattle's Virginia Mason Hospital — a nearly three-hour phone marathon from my home in Newport, R.I. For the next few months, we talked or e-mailed on a regular basis. I provided blood and urine samples at my local hospital, which were then delivered overnight to Seattle and analyzed for compatibility.

I'd always thought "compatible" meant the donor and the recipient had to match on at least five of the six markers used in tissue typing. In fact, even a zero-match kidney from a living donor is far superior to a perfect match from a deceased donor: It begins working more quickly, functions better and offers a higher survival rate.

What every living donor needs to know »