2016 Dawn Dorland Perry

DAWN DORLAND PERRY

Kidney Donor

Age 35 ~ Los Angeles, CA

Donated on 06/24/2015

at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center

Honored by onelegacy.org

While many might be motivated to donate a kidney to a friend or relative in need, to Dawn the suffering of strangers is just as real. Dawn made the decision to donate simply to help someone else, with the hope that a member of her recipient’s family would also donate a kidney (that didn’t match with their loved one) to another stranger. Hours after her kidney retrieval surgery, a local father of 12 was given a new chance. The same day his wife had given the gift of life to a young mother in Oregon.

Dawn’s Story

I’d been reading about living kidney donation for six years before circumstances aligned that allowed me to donate my kidney to a stranger experiencing renal failure. In 2015 I had finished a graduate degree and moved to Los Angeles for my husband’s job. Financial stability, a loving partner, no kids (yet), and locating within a short distance of the UCLA campus hospitals was the magic combination.

While many might be motivated to donate a kidney to a friend or relative in need, to me the suffering of strangers is just as real. I knew that wait times in my new state of California for a deceased-donor kidney were excruciatingly long, on average 14 years. I knew that living donor kidneys tended to last longer after transplant than cadaveric ones and that advances in medical technology could now make one of my kidneys safely available to someone who needed it to survive.

As a nondirected donor I was motivated to start a short surgical chain, to soothe the heartbreak of someone who’d identified a willing-but-incompatible donor by providing my own compatible kidney. It was my hope that the other donor could match my gesture by giving the organ that was useless to their family member or friend to someone with whom they matched from the deceased donor list. In June I underwent kidney retrieval surgery at UCLA; that same day my kidney began functioning for a local father of 12. His wife made a beautiful gesture in response, and within hours her kidney was functioning for another young mother in Oregon.

Prior to this experience, I had no idea that my kidneys worked so beautifully. I wasn’t aware that something I didn’t need could be so valuable and safely made available to someone else. I have simply felt grateful, health-wise and every-otherwise, to be in a position to give, and to continue my life now as a healthy, one-kidneyed human.

I’d like to thank the surgeons and staff of the UCLA Kidney & Pancreas Transplant Programs, as well as the writers Larissa MacFarquhar of The New Yorker and Kevin Sack of The New York Times for the reporting that inspired my gesture. Special thanks Dr. Hans Albin Gritsch, Tonya Frazier, Suzanne McGuire, and Dr. Jeffrey Veale.