This is a story that was sent to me by Lisa Reimer, a fifth grade teacher in Laurel, Montana. I found her story so moving that I immediately looked into both organ donation and bone marrow donation.

Hopefully, if you're reading this, you will do the same!

www.marrow.org
www.transplant.org

If you're too young to consider donating on your own, you can still help raise money and awareness for these great causes.

~ KL ~

Here's Lisa and Bruce's story as adapted from an article in The Laurel Outlook by Larry Tanglen:

Lisa suffers from a hereditary kidney condition called Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD). She was diagnosed in 1994, but she didn't begin to suffer kidney failure until November 2005.
When her kidneys began failing, Reimer's doctor told her she had a year to find a donor. At the time, she was teaching fifth grade at Graff Elementary School, so she had to quit teaching for the last month of the 2006-07 school term.

"I expected to be on a waiting list for the next five or six years," Reimer said. She knew the odds. "Many people don't realize that 17 people die every day waiting for a kidney and that adds up fast."

Then she got an unexpected phone call from the Sharbonos.

Bruce Sharbono's wife, Sue, taught with Reimer at Graff Elementary School. She too, will also someday need kidney replacement surgery, but her husband is not a good blood match for her. After he found out he couldn't give his wife his kidney, she told him that her friend Lisa Reimer needed a kidney transplant and she was running out of options.

“I was shocked when Sue called me one day out of the blue. She wanted to know my blood type. I told her it was A positive,” Reimer related. “So is he,” Sue told Reimer. “He is willing to go through the testing to see if his kidney would be a match so he can donate a kidney to you.”

Reimer was in tears when she hung up the phone. When it came time for the surgery, Sharbono gave up two and a half weeks of his vacation time for his hospital stay.

“This was the first time in Bruce's 48 years he had a surgery. I felt so guilty for everything he had given up for me, someone he hadn't even known a year before. I've never met a man more generous and more humble than Bruce Sharbono,” says Reimer.

The transplant surgery was done by a team of surgeons at Porter Transplant Center in Denver, CO. To learn more about Lisa's transplant surgery you can check out these video links about her story:

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

Video 3

You'll need a version of Windows Media Player 7 or higher to view the video.
If you need to download it, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/mediaplayer/en/default.asp