stethoscope red on wood, Concept, Doctor or medical volunteers to visit elderly people in rural Asia
April is National Donate Life Month, a time to raise awareness of the need for organ and tissue donation.
Manitowoc resident Ron Hinz is an organ recipient, having received a kidney from a family member 11-years ago this July. Hinz tells Seehafer News he became aware of a CRI, or Chronic Renal Insufficiency, back in 2001.
“What that means is my kidneys were not functioning at a level they were expected to for a person my age,” he explained. “They did scans and never found anything definitive but suspect I had a condition called IGA Nephropathy. IGA is a protein that everybody has in their system, kind of like dead blood cells that need to be filtered out of your system.”
Fast forward eight years when Ron’s niece said she would be willing to donate one of her kidneys to her uncle should he need it. Hinz became despondent, however, when tests disclosed two other potential donors were declared ineligible to donate.
That’s when Ron decided he needed to make a phone call.
“It took me a week to work up the courage to call my niece and ask her if she was still willing to donate. And fortunately, she was,” Hinz recalled. “She started testing and I went on dialysis at the same time. In July of 2010 I got a new kidney and haven’t had any problems since that time.”
The Manitowoc resident remembers that leading up to the transplant he had about 12-weeks of dialysis and had it not been for that, he would’ve died from kidney failure in the spring of 2010.
You can register as an organ and tissue donor by going to DonateLifeWisconsin.org.
