Three years ago, a stranger’s gift gave me a second life. This is that story.
For more than two years, my life ran on the rhythm of a dialysis machine; three mornings a week, hooked to a chair, waiting. I had been told the wait for a kidney could stretch to five years. So, I learned to live inside the uncertainty, and to be grateful for the hours the machine still left me.
Then, on September 23, 2023, my phone rang with the words I had been praying to hear: “We have a kidney for you.” In that single moment, everything changed.
Someone I will never meet had made the choice, in life, to become an organ donor. In their family’s darkest hour, they honored that wish. That one decision gave me my life back.
Three years later, I do not take a single morning for granted. The most ordinary moment — a phone call from a grandchild, a quiet dinner with my wife, the sun coming up — has become extraordinary, simply because I am here to live it. In these three years I have reclaimed roughly 1,900 hours once lost to the dialysis chair, and I have tried to fill every one of them with purpose.
To my donor family: there are no words adequate to express my gratitude. Your precious gift became my light. I carry your generosity with me in every heartbeat.
This anniversary celebrates more than medical science. It honors the quiet, miraculous power of human compassion — the surgeons and nurses whose skill sustained me, and above all my wife, who has been my constant through every appointment, every uncertainty, every triumph. Caregivers are the unsung heroes of every transplant story.
They say a single donor can save or improve up to eight lives. Mine gave me back a life and with it, the chance to keep the gift moving. That is the promise I make on this anniversary: to give back plenty, one act of kindness, one life at a time.
If you have never registered as an organ donor, consider this your invitation. There is no wrong day to give a stranger a second chance.
Let’s make a difference in each other’s lives.
Kam Shenai is a retired executive and civic leader in Lake Nona and co-founder of AAPI Coming Together (ACT Florida), a nonpartisan civic-participation group in Central Florida.
