After more than a year of searching for a living kidney donor and enduring five months on dialysis as a means to survive, I finally got the call from the UCLA Kidney Exchange Program with good news.
It was three days after my first Karaoke for Kidneys awareness event held on May 13, 2016, that I received word that I was going to be scheduled for a kidney transplant on June 7. I couldn’t believe that it was finally going to happen for me. Even after my long journey to getting to that point, however, I found myself feeling hesitant. I had low energy ever since my karaoke fundraiser, and I knew that in order to go through with a major surgery, everyone involved needed to be healthy. I went through with my pre-op appointment at UCLA, and, sure enough, after a routine chest x-ray, they found pneumonia. The scheduled transplant surgery date was immediately halted and ultimately scratched. I was completely devastated.
Luckily, just three months later, UCLA contacted me once again with a kidney donor match. This time around, it was an even better pairing, and my donor friend and I would be a part of a kidney chain that was started with an altruistic donor.