Within a year, an Atlanta mother and her two sons donated their kidneys to strangers, and all agreed it was the best thing they’d ever done.
The donors, Amy Parker Zupancic, 60, and her sons Caleb, 30, and Daniel McCracken, 32, came about their decision to donate altruistically through separate paths that had, upon retrospection, a comforting symmetry.
The McCracken brothers, independently of each other, had read the same Twitter article about the shortage of anonymous kidney donors, which led them to investigate the steps in order to do so.
The process, known as living non-directed organ donation, is one that rarely happens, despite a significant backlog of people who are in critical need of a new kidney.
According to a 2020 article in the Penn Medicine News, more than 90,000 patients are waiting for kidney transplants, yet only 20,000 are performed each year. More than 5,000 people on the waiting list die yearly without receiving a new kidney, the article said.
Last June, Caleb went to Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital for the procedure, having matched with an anonymous recipient who was from the Midwest. However, tragedy struck when Caleb’s match came down with COVID-19 a few days before the operation and had to drop out of the process.
Hospital officials quickly found a new local match for Caleb and the procedure went on as planned, Zupancic said.
Daniel followed shortly after, donating his kidney anonymously last December, also at Piedmont, to another man in his 20s.
“The young man who received the kidney from Daniel said his mother had just passed away, and before she died, told him, ‘I think you are going to get your kidney soon,’” Zupancic said. “It was really touching to hear that.”