Donate Life Living Donor Day is a celebration during National Donate Life Month that honors living organ and tissue donors for saving and healing lives.
Donate Life Living Donor Day is a celebration during National Donate Life Month that honors living organ and tissue donors for saving and healing lives. In 2021, more than 6,500 people made the decision to give one of their kidneys or a part of their liver to someone waiting for a second chance at life. Below is the story of one of those amazing people.
Unlike many chronic kidney disease patients, Kristen Lovelace of Oklahoma City had no co-morbidities, just bad genes. “My grandmother died of kidney issues, my father had two kidney transplants and my uncle had one,” says Kristen.
Still, it came as a surprise when she learned she had kidney disease herself. “It was 2009 and I was getting tested to see if I could be a kidney donor for my dad when they told me I couldn’t donate because I too had kidney disease.” Her kidney disease remained stable for years so she was able to live a normal life until 2018 when her condition started to accelerate. “I was getting tired at work but as a nurse you work long hours, so I thought it was normal,” she admits. She eventually learned the fatigue meant what she had feared since she first got her diagnosis.
Kristen was placed on the kidney transplant list in 2019. Many friends and family volunteered to get tested to see if they were a match - but to no avail. “It was discouraging,” she confesses. “I was feeling worse and worse. I knew I would need dialysis soon if we couldn’t find a match. That’s when Jim stepped up.”
Jim Lovelace of Arlington, VA is Kristen’s brother-in-law. “He is not only my husband Mark’s younger brother,” she states. “He is also our hero.”
Jim knew of Kristen’s plight and says he mulled it over and prayed about it before making his decision to donate. “I was vaguely aware of living donation but like most people, I really didn’t give it much thought – until our family was faced with it,” recalls Jim.
A living-donor transplant is a surgical procedure to remove an organ or portion of an organ from a living person and place it in another person whose organ is no longer functioning properly. The popularity of living-organ donation has increased dramatically in recent years as an alternative to deceased-organ donation due to the growing need for organs for transplantation and shortage of available deceased-donor organs. More than 6,000 living-organ donations are reported each year in the United States.
“It’s such a wonderful feeling for all of us on the transplant team when we perform a living donor transplant. It takes the entire transplant team to make sure that all aspects of the donor and recipient have been thoroughly evaluated,” says Shea Samara, M.D., with the Nazih Zuhdi Transplant Institute. “The living donation generally gives the recipient less time on the waiting list and better long term survival.”
He adds, “We performed 16 living donor transplants last year at INTEGRIS Health and we hope to increase the number of living donors in the coming year.”
Jim traveled to Oklahoma City from Virginia to get tested and was a perfect match. “I am a person of faith and my perception on life is one of gratitude,” says Jim. “I’ve been blessed to be a healthy person, so I felt this was a way to share that gift with someone else.”
The transplant took place at INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center on June 14, 2021. Both surgeries were a success. “For years I thought my future was limited by my disease,” says Kristen. “Now it feels wide open thanks to Jim’s gift.”
Jim too was forever changed. “This whole event has unquestionably strengthened my faith, including my faith in science and medicine. It simply blows my mind that a person can give an organ to someone else and then carry on with life, and the recipient has the promise of a much healthier life. I have a renewed faith in God and the way humans can treat each other.”
Both Kristen and Jim say the experience has brought the family even closer together and they hope their story will encourage others to consider living organ donation. Click here to learn more about living kidney donation, or call 405-949-3349.
