New Year, New Life

It's been all the talk around where I live. Or maybe because people know about my medical situation, they've been racing up to tell me about it.

Shortly before Christmas, a man strolled into a suburban Chicago hospital and announced that he wanted to donate one of his kidneys. Not to anyone in particular, he explained; he just felt compelled to give a special Christmas "gift of life" to somebody.

After running the customary battery of tests (physical, not psychological), it was determined that his kidneys were a match for a 60-year-old wife, mother and grandmother from Burbank, Ill., who had been on dialysis for six years while waiting for a transplant donor.

Six years.

Six years of energy- and body-sapping dialysis, every week after exhausting week. Six years of waiting for a matching organ, hoping for the phone to ring with "the call," praying for deliverance. A six-year sentence, six years of a life not being fully lived.

What an indescribably amazing present.

Now, I'm not suggesting that you run out and do the same (Lord knows I can't), but you may be surprised to know that this type of altruism is not as unusual as you might think. According to UNOS (the United Network for Organ Sharing), more than 6,000 living, breathing people donate an organ for transplantation every year, and one out of four of them have no biological connection to the recipient.

Still, to just walk into a hospital and volunteer to give up a part of your body....

The woman in Burbank referred to her donor as "my angel," and she's probably not far from wrong. What a phenomenal way for her – for both of them, actually – to ring in the New Year!

So let me end this meditation the way I end many of my speaking engagements: Please consider organ donation. Just consider it. As of this writing more than 74,000 people are on the active national waiting list for an organ transplant, and hundreds die every year still waiting.

Make the notation on your driver's license. Let your family and friends know of your intentions. Once you're gone, you won't need them. Honest. Trust me. The Walking Dead is just a TV series. It's not real.

And as for donating an organ while you're still living, hey – as gifts go, it beats the heck out of a Kindle.