Geneva nurse gives diabetic guard her kidney

Before they went under the knife together, Merri Lazenby knew Ray Andrade only in passing.

But now they are joined by a deeper bond: he has one of her kidneys, and she has joined his extended family.

As an ER nurse at Delnor Hospital in Geneva, Lazenby knew Andrade as a gentle giant, a big guy who would stand between her and unruly patients who might be hitting or biting or throwing things.

When she saw him in the cafeteria one day and he seemed down, she found out he had renal failure and needed a kidney transplant.

"God gave me two kidneys, and I only need one," she told him. "You can have one of mine."

"It started off as an offhand comment," she said. "But I'm a fixer, a person who fixes things.

"And I'm a religious person. I believe in my heart God would not have put me in that room with Ray if that was not what I was intended to do with my life."

As for the 64-year-old Andrade, he was "flabbergasted" that a virtual stranger would do such a thing for him.

An Aurora resident, he has lived with diabetes for 25 years, and it had gotten progressively worse, to where he needed dialysis to filter his blood three times a week for four hours a day. Andrade's sister had volunteered to donate her kidney, but couldn't do it without jeopardizing her own health.

In January, Lazenby underwent a battery of tests which found, against all odds, that she was almost a perfect match. It was a weighty decision, because donation carries some risks, but with her husband's support, Lazenby decided to go ahead.

The operation took place successfully at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago two months ago.

The recovery was tougher than Lazenby, a 37-yer-old mother of three from St. Charles, had expected, but she got back to work in six weeks. She also is jogging again and is shooting for a half-marathon in May.

Andrade's incision is still healing, and he hopes to return to his rounds in the coming weeks.

"I thank God for her, because she basically saved my life," Andrade said. "It's like she was meant to be there at that time, an angel that came to answer my prayers. So you have to have faith, and believe in your fellow human being."

Donations by virtual strangers like Lazenby are rare.

Northwestern does more living donor kidney transplants than anywhere else in the country, but sees just five or ten such volunteers a year out of 150 transplants, and only one or two pass the tests to make sure it's safe, according to program Director Dr. Joseph Leventhal.

Lazenby has never regretted her spur-of-the-moment offer.

"I believe I got so much more out of the operation than I gave," she said, saying she has become a member of Andrade's extended family of two children and five granddaughters. "We joke that it was hard to wrap, but I gave him his Christmas present early."

Nationally, the need for donors remains intense. The number of people waiting for a kidney transplant almost doubled in the past decade to nearly 80,000, and more than 1,000 people a year die waiting for a donor.

Because incompatible donors and recipients can swap with other compatible patients, a single donor can trigger multiple donations and save more than one life.

The National Kidney Registry, established last year, matches these gracious donors with desperate recipients. For information, see kidneyregistry.org, or call (800) 936-1627.