Before the sun comes up Tuesday, Rachel Garneau’s boyfriend will drive her from her home in Elmhurst to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where a surgeon will operate on this perfectly healthy 20-year old college junior and remove her left kidney.
That is the first paragraph in a two-part series in the Chicago Sun-Times by columnist Neil Steinberg that ran a few weeks ago – I’ve been meaning to post about it and just got a little behind with life, so I’m puttin’ it out there now…
The stories are about a 20-year-old young woman who decided to become an altruistic living kidney donor… The two columns are, in my opinion, well worth the read. They tell a story about a very special woman, and a very special gift…
The first story, published on May 29, 2011, titled “Student Giving Stranger a Kidney”, tells about the path to Rachel’s decision…
The second story, published on May 31, 2011, titled “Cutting out a kidney is gloopy work”, touches on Rachel’s surgery. (And the surgeon's description of the pancreas made me laugh out loud...)
At the end of the first column, the surgeon who accommodated Rachel’s gift said:
“I just think she’s on a higher moral plane,” she said. “She’s great. She’s awesome. She is just an incredibly generous person who saw this is the right thing to do.”
There’s a YouTube video that Donate Life Illinois produced about a similar young lady, who gave a similar gift. I’ve always thought it was a very powerful video – Rachel reminded me of the person in this video:
I know people like Rachel… I know people who have done what Rachel has done – and I know people who are considering doing what Rachel did. For those of us waiting for a kidney, lungs, heart, liver – any lifesaving organ – or those of us who have received a gift like this from a living donor, or someone who has passed away and became an organ donor – I hope that Rachel, and people like Rachel can someday, somehow understand how people like me feel about her.
I do believe that there is pure goodness in this world – I’ve already been the beneficiary of quite a bit of that… After eleven years breathing with Kari’s beautiful lungs, and dealing with the rather-toxic medications coursing through my system that allow me to breathe with them – I’ll need a kidney in the not-too-distant future… Hearing stories like Rachel’s leaves me with a little less fear, a little more hope, and a very warm feeling in my heart…
