Opposites Attract

My husband needed a liver transplant, and time was running out. Where was the donor we so desperately needed?

- Karen Straub

Organ donor criteria: Forty-five years of age or younger. Must be in good health. Same height and weight as donor recipient. Universal blood type. Nonsmoker.

I sat at the kitchen table, rereading the brochures from the hospital and feeling more and more hopeless with every word. The perfect donor didn’t seem to exist. And without that perfect donor, my husband, Rich, didn’t have a chance.

He was 52 years old and dying of liver failure. He’d been on the transplant list for almost a year. When Rich first got sick, I was hopeful. Every time the phone rang, I ran for it, thinking it was the hospital calling to tell us they found Rich a liver. But that call never came. Meanwhile, every day brought more bad news, like the discovery that Rich had liver cancer too. My husband was an upbeat guy. He never missed an opportunity to tell a joke. But even he had lost his spark. His once lively green eyes held a look of defeat. Some mornings he had to drag himself out of bed. I barely recognized the man who had swept me off my feet 12 years earlier.

I closed the brochure and thought of Rich back then. He was bartending at a restaurant in New Jersey where my friend dragged me for dinner one night. “Whoa,” Rich said when he approached our table. He blinked dramatically. “Your smile just literally lit up the whole room!”