A Maine woman who advertised for a kidney donor on her car window has received the lifesaving transplant, and both she and the donor she had never previously met are doing well, reports say.
Chrisine Royles, 24, who is the mother of a two-year-old, was suffering from kidney failure, wrote a message on her car’s rear window saying she was in need of a kidney donor, the
Portland Press Herald reports.
Royles, who was diagnosed with kidney failure in 2013 due to lupus, was placed on a waiting list of more than 100,000 in need of kidney transplants in 2014, but she decided to see her own.
Joshua Dall-Leighton, a corrections officer, spotted Royles’ car in a mall parking lot and stepped forward, telling his wife, “I need to do this,” the Portland Press Herald reported.
Royles started a fundraising campaign to raise the $6,000 needed to defray the cost of Dall-Leighton taking off work during his recovery, but, spurred by media reports of the story, the fund raised $50,000.
Hospital concerns over legal issues raised by the donations nearly derailed Royles’ effort, but they were smoothed over, and the transplant went ahead on Tuesday.
After the surgery, the hospital issued a statement saying that the surgery had went well and both Royles and Dall-Leighton are expected to make “strong recoveries.”
The paper also quoted Dall-Leighton’s wife Ashley as saying that the couple plans to donate any excess monies to charity after the true cost of the transplant surgery is known.
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