During the recent holiday break, most people were enjoying time with their families. However, three teachers in North Texas had three surgeries to donate their kidneys.
What a wonderful Christmas story! They all happened at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth over the course of three days, starting on December 20. Kathy Knowles (left) and Louise Bailey (right).jpgHealth in Texas. Kathy Knowles and Louise Bailey are on the left.
Louise Bailey was the first teacher to have surgery. She is retired but still works as an art helper at J.C. Thompson Elementary in the Northwest Independent School District. She made this choice because of something that happened to her in college.
When Bailey moved back to the North Texas area in 2020, she met with Kathy Knowles, her college roommate, who was now a retired Keller school principal and was on dialysis for stage 4 kidney disease.
As part of the driver’s test, I had to answer, “Would you consider becoming an organ donor?” The man says. “I say to myself, ‘Why don’t I do it now?’” I’m in pretty good health.’” She called Knowles right away after the test and asked, “Do you want a kidney?” “Do you have a spare one somewhere?” asked Knowles. Bailey says she wasn’t scared about having surgery and doesn’t feel bad about her choice.
He says in a release, “I really felt God’s hands in all of this.” It was the right thing to do because I know how hard things have been for her and hope this will make her life better. If you think this is brave, Ava Nickerson, a science teacher at Valley View High School north of Denton, gave a stranger a kidney the next day.
It’s clear that Nickerson wasn’t motivated by personal reasons to do this. She might never even know the name of the person who got her kidney. She did this kind thing because of her son, who earlier this year gave one of his kidneys to a stranger without expecting anything in return.
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Nickerson said, “I teach anatomy and am always amazed by how our bodies are made.” “I know that my body can work with one kidney even though I have two.” Someone whose kidneys aren’t working right doesn’t feel good, so I pray that the person who gets the kidneys will have a much better quality of life.
A special education teacher and coach at Highland Park Middle School, Mike Trevino, gave Mason Williams, a kidney twenty-four hours after this surgery was over. They met when they were both coaches at Fort Worth’s Polytechnic High School.
After they left each other, these two coworkers stayed in touch through text messages and eventually got together to watch a Polytechnic game. This is when Trevino says he learned that Williams was born with only one kidney, which is what caused his health problems at the time.
“He told me that his one kidney had failed all the way down to about 10 percent,” according to Trevino. Trevino started thinking about how he could help his former friend because he couldn’t get the thought of his health problem out of his mind. They were found to be a match after some tests were done.
“I saw it this way: they have a daughter the same age as my granddaughter.” She says, “I’ve had a great life and I don’t think it’s going to end any time soon. But he had too much going for him to be unhealthy, and it would be terrible for him to die soon.”
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