LOUISVILLE, Ky. — One woman is getting a fresh start after receiving a kidney from a total stranger.
Alyssa Grimes got to ring the bell and take the living donor honor walk at the Trager Transplant Center in downtown Louisville.
Grimes gave her kidney to a woman she didn’t even know. Grimes never anticipated being a donor, but when she saw a sign that Kayla Doty needed a kidney, she says she felt like something was calling her to do it.
“It was just something that stuck out to me that I really wanted to do. I didn’t quite feel like a choice, I guess. It kind of felt like I was the one who kept seeing the sign. My heart hurt for whoever was in so much need,” said Grimes.
Grimes had her surgery Tuesday morning, April 16, and on Wednesday, got to meet Doty for the first time.
“It was really emotional and there weren’t really any words to be said at first. You know, I don’t know what to say to her, really, other than I’m as grateful to her as she is to me,” said Grimes.
Doty has had Type 1 diabetes since she was 12. When she was 14 years old, she had a bad go-cart accident which then injured her kidney. Doty has been on the kidney transplant wait list for two years and on dialysis for almost a year. Her mother, Roxanna Doty, is still in shock from the selfless donation of Grimes.
“A gift like that you don’t expect. And not very many people do it. So it was just amazing because we didn’t know the donor, it wasn’t family. It was just somebody that read the sign, which we’ve had for a long time,” her mother said.
Doty is already feeling better and her mother says through this process, she gained another daughter.
“She doesn’t get this experience a lot because she never felt good. So now she just is going to feel so much better. She’ll be able to literally relive life, and be healthy about it,” Doty’s mother shared.
Dr. Dylan Adamson, the doctor who performed the transplant surgery, says between about 20,000 and 25,000 kidney transplants occur every year and about 20% of those come from a living donor.
“Most people would benefit from a living donor versus a deceased donor, mainly because the long-term, expected function of that kidney is going to be longer for a live, healthy person, but there really just aren’t enough people that have really stepped up to become donors. We would certainly be better off if we had more people stepping up,” said Adamson.
Grimes says she is grateful for the opportunity to help make Doty’s life better.
“I was really glad to be able to do it because as soon as they put it in, it started working immediately for her. And that’s just, you know, that’s just the best news,” said Grimes.
Grimes and Doty hope others are encouraged to step up to help give someone life as there are 90,000 people waiting on the kidney transplant list.
Last year, there was about 5,000 overall transplants from a live donor.