Hey, buddy. Can you donate a kidney?

Published December 5, 2014

by Carter Wrenn, Talking About Politics, December 4, 2014.

About two decades ago, WRAL and WTVD ran a story about a young woman, Beverly Jones, who’d donated one of her kidneys to her husband whose kidneys had failed.

Now usually, kidney donors have to be blood relatives – but not always and Beverly was the first unrelated kidney donor ever accepted by the transplant program at Duke.
Back then, Beverly and Stan lived next door to me and, in addition, Stan's mother Frances had worked for Jesse Helms for years, running his Raleigh office. I'd probably have been fired two weeks after I started working with Jesse if it hadn't been for Frances. But that's another story.
Today, the kidney Beverly gave Stan is failing and he’s been on a waiting list for a year, and sick, and he could still wait years – except for one hope: A program that reduces how long a person spends on a waiting list for a new kidney.
The program was started at Johns Hopkins back in 2001 and at Duke in 2011 and works like this: Say a person (like Stan) needs a kidney and has a donor (say, his brother) but the brother’s kidney is incompatible. It allows Stan and his donor to do a 'kidney-swap' with another family who’s in the same situation.
That sounds odd and improbable but when you consider there're 2,800 people in NC waiting for kidney transplants it's not that improbable at all.

So here's why I'm writing to my Honorable (and hard-pressed) friends in the Fourth Estate: What Stan needs is publicity – stories in the newspaper and on radio and on television about the ‘kidney swap program.’ I know that's a lot to ask but these are good folks and they're in a tough spot.

If you‘d like to lend a ‘helping hand’ by writing a story call me or email me (info@talkingaboutpolitics.com) and I’ll call you. Happy Christmas.

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