No Pictures, but a couple of stories

We forgot to take pictures on Saturday, but a couple of stories...

Carl went to the Venture Out (the community where we own a lot) Ham Radio meeting on Saturday morning. The presentation was not on a ham radio topic, but rather on organ donation. The woman presenting shared that several years ago, she was in a training class, and one of the participants was not able to stay for the whole class due to his dialysis. She talked with him at break, and he shared that he knew that he was dying, and was just hoping to live long enough to see his son graduate from high school. He had been looking for a donor match for 6 years but had given up hope on finding one. The class they were attending was dealing with social networking and the students were challenged to come up with a project where they used their social networks to address a problem. The woman recommended that they use their contacts to find a kidney for the man in the class and all agreed. They got many people to sign up to get tested on whether they could be matches. It turned out that the woman was an amazingly perfect match -- so much so that the doctors could not believe it and re-did the match algorithm -- the man and the woman were not related, in fact, he was black and she was white -- the doctors said that only a twin would be a closer match.

Her family was not supportive of her donating her kidney, but she went ahead, and, on September 25, 2001 (that's right, two weeks after 9/11), one of her kidneys was removed and transplanted into the man. He ended up living to see his son graduate high school, college, and get married. 

I found an article: https://ourweekly.com/news/2011/03/10/world-kidney-day-the-mike-jones-story/

and a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvBvutLGhdk

and another article: http://donatelifememorial.blogspot.com/2013/03/mike-jones-kidney-recipient-community_10.html 

On Saturday afternoon, we had made arrangements to meet up with Tom and Gayle at Val Vista Villages. This is a couple that Carl and Sue got to know at Val Vista a few years ago, and we wanted to be able to meet up with them -- so we got together in the afternoon. I appreciated the opportunity to get to meet them and we had a nice time catching up with each other. Unfortunately, we forgot to take pictures!!!