Uab Performs Largest Kidney Transplant Chain

about a hundred thousand people in the United States are waiting for a kidney transplant and only about 11,000 of them actually receive a kidney transplant every year and many patients die while waiting for a kidney transplant upwards of fifteen percent and so many of these individuals turn to family friends and even strangers to be living kidney donors on their behalf unfortunately because of blood group and tissue incompatibilities about 50 percent of the donors that come forward to donate on someone's behalf will be found to be incompatible with their intended recipient and so these patients who are found to be incompatible with their donors typically are relegated to the deceased donor waiting list and patients depending on their blood type can spend upwards of ten years waiting for a deceased donor kidney to become available because the demand for these organs still continues to exceed our supply what we have to do is find ways to overcome these incompatibilities and doing that begins with hope it begins with some altruism on the behalf of people like our non directed donor Ms Coke it begins at the group of individuals who are determined to make a difference to the people you see standing here today and many people who couldn't join us and it begins as an institution that really does believe that knowledge can change our world that's how we went about over the course the last 10 years putting all the pieces together to build UAB's incompatible kidney transplant program it is the only one of its kind in the southeast that has the ability to not only offer paired exchange but offer desensitization where we overcome those incompatibilities and it makes us very unique I'd like to talk about this story if you will today and share it with everybody because it embodies some wonderful qualities qualities of selflessness that started this Act qualities of trust on the part of our donors and recipients willing to go through a process where they are willing to share their donors allow us to do things to them that they would not otherwise need in the normal course of action it also showcases the incredible caring of every one of those 100 people that are involved in making these 13 transplants happen every one of those people don't look at the clock from eight nine o'clock in the morning at five o'clock in the evening and those are my hours. They're here until the work is done and the snowstorm showcased that but even when there isn't a snow storm that's the quality and that's the diligence and that's the caring that all of our team members have for which we're incredibly grateful and incredibly proud at the end of the day this is a story of hope hope for all those patients that aren't there they're hopefully hearing the story all those donors there that may have thought about or wanted to do this and can't do it for whatever reason it's hope for us to be able to help those thirty-five hundred patients that we have on our list make that list as small as we can. Last week a lot of strangers help other strangers whether you took somebody into your house and fed them in the cold weather you gave him gas for the car that was off the road strangers help strangers last week not only in Birmingham but all over the southeast I'd like to encourage you to take that a step further and donate your kidney to a stranger if you can. A lot of these people they knew and they know the person who's going to get their kidney and and that to me is a lot more pressure than I had feel like I guess I kind of dropped it off and left I obeyed God and left the consequent up to him they have more pressure because they have family members but here's the thing: what if you are somebody else's stranger what if some family out there needs a kidney and they're praying for you if you can give them shelter during a storm if you can give them food go a step further and really give them a part of you