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Would you give your kidney to a stranger?
At this moment 85,000 people are still waiting for a donor,
someone like Linda Russell.
In tonight’s cover story News
Channel 5’s Kay Quinn explains what makes this local grandmother so special.
Like most women her age, Linda Russell is enjoying retirement.
If she’s not in the kitchen baking you'll likely find her spending time with family.
So when her daughter-in-law, a transplant nurse
at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington DC came to visit,
what started as small talk about organ donation prompted Russell
to make a big decision.
And I said do you mean that I have an extra kidney?
I mean I have a kidney that I really don’t use?
And she said yeah.
I said “Oh my gosh, I’ll donate it.”
And of course she was thrown aback because it was just –
it was a conversation that just sort of took on its own life.
With no specific recipient in mind, Russell became the rarest type of donor.
In 2009 only 75 others have agreed to donate a kidney to a total stranger.
Dr. Surendra Shenoy is a transplant surgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
But there are a few people in the society who say
“Okay, I’ve taken so much from the society and I really want to give it back.”
The medical community calls them altruistic donors.
To someone living on dialysis, they're heroes.
None of us have any guarantees in life.
I don’t know what's going to happen down the road,
I have no idea, but on the other hand,
how do I even know that I'm going to hang on to that
just in the off chance that I'm going to need it?
Russell was selected as part of a large exchange program,
matching seven donors and recipients from all over the country.
Even as surgery loomed, Russell’s faith in her decision didn’t waver.
Days later Russell met the stranger she’ll now have a connection to forever.
It was a little awkward when we met just because I just –
she kept saying thank you, thank you, thank you.
Before the surgery, Oluremi Adetosoye was just a mom from Washington DC,
a kidney dialysis patient who was waiting, like so many others.
Now, Russell says, they have an unbreakable bond.
She’s just so happy and she’s so thankful to have another chance at life.
Most donors, almost all of them, if you are going to ask them the question
whether really I will do it again, they will say if they get the chance,
They always have a very positive outcome and they feel very glad to find
that they have done something.
A life saved by an organ donor; a regular everyday grandmother from Missouri.
For Russell, it was less about courage and more about a calling.
Well when you feel called to do something and regardless of how risky that seems
or how uncertain that seems and you just give that,
you just surrender that and say “Okay, I’ll do it,”
and then you see what happens afterwards, you se the benefit of that,
it just makes you realize what's important in life.
Russell says she has no regrets.
An avid runner, she quickly picked the sport up back and is feeling like her old self.
If you have any interest in being an altruistic donor or taking part
in an exchange program, visit this story in the Cover Story section of ksdk.com
where we’ll connect you with a complete list of donor resources.