Donor Diaries

Healing, Sobriety, and Connection with Triple Donor Anthony Cernera | EP 29

• Laurie Lee • Season 3 • Episode 3

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In this episode, Anthony Cernera, a three-time living organ donor, opens up about his transformative journey of giving and personal healing. His story began with a simple Facebook post that sparked a deep desire to help others, leading him to donate a portion of his liver, kidney, and stem cells. These selfless acts not only changed the lives of his recipients but also had a profound impact on Anthony's own mental health, helping him navigate struggles with depression and addiction.

Anthony shares his powerful connections with his recipients, including Lance, his kidney recipient, and a leukemia patient in California, and how these bonds have supported his commitment to sobriety. He emphasizes the role of support systems and the importance of being transparent during the donor evaluation process. This episode highlights how service and connection can be healing, providing a sense of purpose and belonging, which Anthony has found through both organ donation and his involvement in recovery work.

Listen in for an uplifting reminder of how kindness and selflessness can create positive change, not only in the lives of recipients but also for the donors themselves.  This episode is a great source of hope and inspiration for kidney donors who may have to jump through some extra hoops due to their mental health history.

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Three Time Living Donor Hopes to Inspire Others to Donate
Anthony Cernera in Men’s Health
Fairfield Man an Organ Donor Three Times Over

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Anthony :

I think people at a transplant center understand why people like me, who struggle with addiction and with depression, really need meaning, purpose and hope in their life. Whoa, I just want to feel the sunshine.

Laurie:

I just want to feel the sunshine.

Laurie:

Whoa Hello, and welcome back to Donor Diaries, a podcast that explores the transformative power of living organ donation transformative power of living organ donation. In today's episode, I'm joined by Anthony Cernera, a three-time living organ donor, public speaker, semi-professional skydiver and former director of philanthropy at St Vincent's Medical Center, who recently started his second career in psychotherapy and mental health counseling. Anthony is going to share his fascinating donation stories and his deeply personal journey with mental health. Becoming a living donor requires you to be both mentally and physically fit, and an entire team of professionals is dedicated to ensuring you're in a good place to donate. Anthony opens up about how he used his donation journeys as a way to thrive and find a renewed sense of purpose. This episode is truly a testament to resilience and hope, reminding us that, even if the path to donation includes extra hurdles which it does for many, many donors the rewards can be life-changing, not just for the recipient, but for the donor as well. Welcome to Donor Diaries, anthony. I'm so excited to have you as a guest today.

Anthony :

Thank you, it's an honor to be here.

Laurie:

And you have a really interesting status if you want to call it that in the organ donation world. Can you tell us why you're a bit different than the other kidney donors who've been on this podcast?

Anthony :

Yeah, I hit the kind of like donor lottery. So, like a growing number of us, I am a double donor. I was able to both donate a sectional liver and a kidney. But where I got really lucky was in 2017, I also matched through the bone marrow registry and was able to do stem cells for a leukemia patient. So there's a small group of double donors, but there's even a smaller group of us who have found a way to figure out how to be a third donor, and some women are donating eggs. There's a lot of sort of creative ways people are finding that third donation, but it's very hard to find a match through the stem cell, through the bone marrow registry, and I got lucky and was able to connect with somebody through that.

Laurie:

Wow, truly incredible. So, first and foremost, thank you and congratulations. That's an amazing thing to have served humankind with three donations and all anonymous donations. Right, you didn't know any of the people that you were donating to that they know who needs the donation the best, but ultimately not anonymous.

Anthony :

I'd love to talk about that in a second, but I've gained three really amazing friends. I mean, these relationships that I've been able to develop with these extraordinary human beings have been a really wonderful gift.

Laurie:

Sounds like a nice cherry on top.

Anthony :

Absolutely.

Laurie:

So in what order did you do these three donations?

Anthony :

every morning I would meditate, set these beautiful, loving intentions for how I was going to make the world a better place, and then signed on to Facebook, of all things, and saw my friend Wendy talk about she was going to donate one of her kidneys to her best friend's son, and she had this little throwaway line at the end, something along the lines of you know how could I not do this thing? That would only minorly inconvenience me and it would, you know, save somebody else's life. And you know, being a bit of a contrarian, I wanted to, like, immediately prove her wrong. Like you absolutely have to have two kidneys to live, why else would you have two of them? You must be in a constant state of medical crisis without your second kidney. So I started doing some Googling so I could tell Wendy that she was wrong, that this was not going to be a minor inconvenience, that this was actually a terrible mistake she was about to make Terrible idea and I discovered almost immediately what any of us who look into organ donation is is.

Anthony :

Our medical providers are extraordinary human beings. They've really worked out the kinks of these things. Organ donation is safe. Kidney donation is common. It's about as close as you can get to an outpatient procedure.

Anthony :

So many of us are out within 24 hours of a surgery and, as a Buddhist who would start every day asking himself how he was going to make a world a better place, I was suddenly confronted with a question because of Wendy's Facebook post that I had never really anticipated having to answer. Could I be one of those people who would do something like that? And, laurie, I had so much fear around the potential of of the surgery. I just there was something about anesthesia the whole the idea of going under it was intimidating. Before I did it the first time and I wrestled with this for weeks I had a really beautiful kind of like the universe nudging me in a direction.

Anthony :

I took a job doing some consulting work for Northwell Health at the end of 2015. So I'm like, two months into this, like, ooh, I really was this good person that I'm striving to be and I could do this donation without any real downside but like, oh, I've got the fear. I'm kind of fronting. I was kind of like waffling on this issue for six, seven weeks. I started doing a little consulting work for Northwell Health and the office which I was going to provide my consulting services. I had to walk in through the dialysis center and I was confronted with every morning for a week having my meditation who do I want to be in this world? Like, yeah, what am I going to do that's going to help somebody today walk into a dialysis center, knowing seeing the suffering that goes along with that kind of medical intervention and knowing that I had the ability to do something about it.

Anthony :

It was. It was a beautiful, beautiful way of like the universe sort of conspiring to get me to do this thing.

Laurie:

So the universe was saying yeah, and if you forget, you can walk through here again tomorrow and we'll remind you again.

Anthony :

It's jumping up and down and waving flags in my face and setting off sirens and fireworks. I couldn't have. So I ended up making my donation through Northwell. Whoever was my intended first recipient died and I don't know if it was a man or a woman, I don't know if it was a child.

Anthony :

It was a very weird form of grief to have for a couple of weeks imagined kind of going through this testing and working through some of the anxiety and fear associated with the buildup to the donation, to then find out that that person didn't live long enough for the surgery. It was a tough loss and I didn't have great social supports because I was trying to do this quiet thing to lean on. And then I didn't know how to process a grief that didn't have a name and a face and a storyline to it. I was reassigned and 10 days later ended up making my kidney donation. And then I don't know if it's worth pausing here and kind of commenting on any of the recovery, but the kidney donation was extraordinary. I wasn't even taking Tylenol five days after the surgery. I was running three weeks after and I, a semi-professional skydiver I jumped out of my next airplane 27 days after the kidney donation. I was shocked at how quickly I was back into the swing of my regular life.

Laurie:

And so, less than a month later, you're skydiving. And then what happened next? That made you think I'm going to take this a step further.

Anthony :

So this is just another stroke of the universe looking out for me. So I actually didn't have a very positive experience donating the kidney and if you had asked me two, three, four, five months afterwards if I would do it again, I would have absolutely said no, unequivocally, without a doubt. The problem for me of being anonymous is this debate. I work in nonprofit fundraising. Every once in a while somebody will say oh, you know, there's no altruism Like people just do things because you know they get something out of it. And even if it's just feeling good, you know that somehow I think, almost as if to impugn acts of generosity we say that because you're getting something, you know, a feeling of good out of it that somehow cheapens it in a way.

Anthony :

I think of it a little bit differently. I think that human beings are we're thinking, perceiving, learning machines, right, we're out there, kind of sensing our way around the world, and when we do good it feels good because we are accurately perceiving and sensing what it is in the world. And by doing my organ donation without either the social validation that comes from your friends and family really being able to celebrate this act of kindness and being able to enjoy that experience with you and then to really even more impactfully remove yourself from getting to see the impact that the donation makes by transforming somebody's life. I had chosen to go about making my donation, so I didn't learn or grow as a result of the donation. I just kind of had this experience. It hurt for a little while and then I went back to life as normal and it was like, well, that was a lot of effort for what felt like at the time nothing.

Laurie:

So what happened, where you decided to go on and do this again?

Anthony :

After 11 years of being in the bone marrow registry, I got a phone call out of the blue and you know a good ways. A year and a half out from the kidney donation. I was a match woman. All I knew was a female in California who was leukemia patient who needed stem cells after her treatment, and they explain the asparifis not great with pronunciation. It's basically like a long blood donation or anybody who's donated plasma at a blood bank knows what it's like. You sit somewhere for three, four hours hooked up to a machine. You go home afterwards and that sounded easy enough. I was perfectly happy to do it, and the stem cell donation was so easy that a year later, in the spring of 2018, when I got a phone call back from them to tell me that my recipient was doing well and that she would love to connect for a phone call and that their policy would be the match was, they waited for a year for a positive outcome before making a patient and donor connection. I literally didn't remember, when they called back a year later, what they were referring to, because the stem cell donation was just such an easy process. It sounds awful, but I had literally forgotten I had even done it and I had this totally unexpected later that afternoon conversation with Jill Tracy, who was my stem cell recipient, and she shared pictures of her dogs who she was now allergic to, because, like me, I'm allergic to my pets and you hand off your immune system to somebody, you give them your allergies. So she has my pet allergies now and I had a good laugh over that and got to hear about what it meant to her to be able to continue to be a presence in her children and her grandchildren's life thanks to recovery after her cancer treatment. And it was incredibly rewarding that phone call. I was in the timing again, the universe kind of like looking out for me, maybe when I couldn't myself. I was not in a great place managing my depression at that particular moment and I had also very recently relapsed after six years of continuous sobriety from drugs and alcohol. So I was in a pretty dark place when I got Jill's phone call and it was so hope-inspiring to know that there was just this really positive story out there and then I was a small part of it. It was really rewarding and so when I got off the phone with her I emailed my original transplant center Every couple of months, my kidney recipient, lance, would reach out and say that he wanted to connect and to get to know me, and I had always denied the request, sort of staying with the anonymity, and I decided it was time to meet Lance and Lori.

Anthony :

I thought the conversation with Jill was beautiful. The conversation with Lance was even better. He was this guy who was only just a few years older than me who told me a story about immigrating here from Jamaica and getting to start this life and he would regularly go back to travel to see his family and because of dialysis and his mother's illness, she hadn't been able to come out and see him for a few years and he wasn't able to travel to Jamaica anymore. And he had actually had, a few days before the kidney donation and a conversation with his mother that he thought was going to be his last, and he told me about filling up 20 suitcases full of clothes and donations from his church and flying to Jamaica for the first time after his kidney transplant and getting to see his mom and to get to feel like he could contribute back to his community again.

Anthony :

And it's a little hard to talk about without crying. You know the thing about depression and especially the way it interacts with addiction. Laura is so easy to buy into the narrative that we're not good enough that we're hopeless. The world would be a better place without us go back to being who Lance is in the world to be the man who is a kind and generous father and who organizes these donations for his community and brings so much prosperity and joy into his hometown. My desire to have been anonymous and kind of like work on some of this ego stuff denied me the joy of getting to be a part of Lance's life and to feel strengthened by some of the good that he does in the world. That was really helpful. I wasn't probably in the worst place I've ever been in 2018, but I was not in a great place two years into a relapse after a long stint of sobriety, and it was really helpful. Those two conversations were really helpful and kind of changing that narrative in my mind. You know like actually the world is a little bit of a better place with me in it and you know, maybe if I keep doing a little bit more good, I will be filled with hope and optimism that the future could be a little bit better.

Anthony :

And that started me on the deliberation process for what did I need to do to get healthy and well so I could also be a liver donor.

Anthony :

So led me back to recovery, got me exercising and losing weight and quit drinking again and was able to do a third donation. That this time I didn't do so privately and got to celebrate with family and friends and when I was scared before the surgery I could lean on people. Celebrate with family and friends and when I was scared before the surgery I could lean on people and when I was going through the recovery which is hard liver recovery is hard I had a lot of people to love me and support me and help me through that. And really got to have the privileged chance of getting to have a third new friend, a brother, in my life. That has given me a little resume. That makes it very hard to buy the narrative that the depression and addiction has in the back of our minds right. It's really hard to look at kind of this portfolio of good deeds that I've been lucky enough to be a part of and say you know what the depression's right?

Laurie:

Wow. Would you be open to sharing more about your journey to sobriety and your own mental health challenges and how that's affected your life?

Anthony :

Yeah, I am a product of a loving, safe home with a great community. We had enough food. We had good roof over our head. I had loving family members and siblings. I had no trauma. But when I was 10 years old I was sad and it didn't make sense as to why I was sad.

Anthony :

By the time I was 13, I was seeking treatment for depression and my teenage years were rough, but they got really bad when I discovered drinking. I was just about 17 years old when I had my first alcoholic beverage and immediately got sick, threw up on myself and decided that I had found the solution to my depression. It was the first time that I had felt something akin to comfortable in my own skin in a few years and unfortunately, because of the genetic makeup I have, there is some addiction that runs in my family. I went from having never drank to I drank until I blacked out, drunk every day for six months as a young man. I mean I was just turning 17. It's kind of shocking to look at in retrospect. That culminated in a suicide attempt. I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks. It was a pretty close call a suicide attempt. I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks. It was a pretty close call. It really took me a good seven years after that to get well enough to start functioning as a society, did not go to college, was in and out of living in my parents' basement in my early 20s, drank every single day. I was 25 years old.

Anthony :

It was 2007 when I was lucky enough to have gotten desperate enough to ask for help and had a family friend who was a member of AA called her up. She sent two of her male friends over. They picked me up and went to an AA meeting and I, thanks to this amazing fellowship of volunteers and other people who were in recovery, was able to put together a much better life. But what a 12-step program taught me was something so much more important about my health and well-being than just putting the booze down. I did absolutely need to stop drinking. That is a central fact of my mental health and wellness. But I think in part of the reason. I think there's some genetic predisposition in me towards addiction. But this is the depression that really gives life, that I think that pairs up with my addiction. That makes it really dangerous. And what I learned in a 12 step program? 12 steps all about you get lucky enough to get your life together and now you got to go and be of service to somebody else, make somebody else's life better.

Anthony :

I had been such a mess for the 10 years before I got sober that I couldn't think of anybody else. Maybe I was a good person, I don't know. I don't think I was a bad person. I certainly was struggling, but I was struggling too much to be able to think of other people. I think the first time I ever did any volunteering that wasn't my parents being kind enough to drag me to something try to get a little experience of it as a young person was because of a 12-step program and completely reoriented my life. I started working in nonprofit fundraising. Day job was oriented to helping people. I worked in service and recovery and that did more to treat the depression than really anything else could, because it changes that narrative. I'm connected to people, so I feel supported, I'm not alone and I'm making the world a better place, which gives me a little bit of a sense of hope for a better future, which I think is a really important anecdote to depression.

Laurie:

It sounds like you managed your depression by finding ways to connect to others, and whether that be through AA or giving away multiple parts of your body, you kept finding that connection and it sounds like this has very much become a lifestyle for you. Is that accurate?

Anthony :

That reality that I think what's so sad about addiction is it cuts us off from the people closest to us right we hurt the people we love, either from they just hate watching us do what we're doing to ourself. We can be not our best selves around them when we're struggling with our addictions. Addiction is really hard on the whole family, and being able to mend those relationships, to create repair, to reconnect with those folks we know all the evidence indicates that it makes people less likely to relapse. But we also know that it facilitates a broader amount of healing too, and for me that was definitely true. You nailed it. For me it is about connection. How are we sharing these pieces of ourselves with each other to make our lives and their lives equally better? That there's no separation between those two things Me getting healthier, me quitting drinking made my whole family's life better. My family's life being better made my life better. There are indicate that there's even a separation between those two things is, I think, to kind of have a weird view of what a family actually is.

Laurie:

I think to kind of have a weird view of what a family actually is. Transplant centers handle people with mental health challenges carefully during the donor evaluation and I understand this is for good reason. They don't want someone's mental health to be negatively impacted when they donate. Can you describe your experience as a donor navigating your evaluations?

Anthony :

This was something that both of my transplant centers looked at very carefully because of my history right. So I had had a hospitalization in my teenage years. It was a consequence of a suicide attempt. But you know, going into the kidney donation I had been sober for over six years, so they were pretty confident in that. But what my evaluation looked like was more than just your normal sort of standard check the box psyche eval. They wanted a letter from my therapist, who I had a multi-year relationship with my med provider, my psychiatrist, who provides my antidepressant.

Anthony :

I think that was comparable in both rounds the kidney and the liver donation.

Anthony :

And then there were, especially for altruistic donors.

Anthony :

There's always a couple of layers of conversations, I think a little just wanting to make sure that people who are doing a donation not motivated by a direct family member or friend, that they're in a healthy place and that their motivations for doing this thing that carries a little bit of risk right, it's not a completely risk-free thing, so there'll be some kind of psych evaluation.

Anthony :

I think mine were a little bit more extensive and detailed than other people, but that gave me confidence that the medical professionals at the heart of these procedures they're not willing to make one person's life worse off to help another, and I think, with somebody who might initially say, ooh geez, that's a complicated mental health history, are you really sure you should be doing this? I think people at a transplant center understand why people like me who struggle with addiction and with depression, really need meaning, purpose and hope in their life, and that both of the donations helped me, and so I really felt like the evaluation process was respectful of my autonomy. But ultimately, what I appreciated about the mental health staff at sure, if this is a safe step for anything, how do we help him get into this process so he can get the benefits that come from getting to do a little good?

Laurie:

It sounds like you had an open-minded team.

Anthony :

Yeah, I mean, life is messy, right and it's hard, and I think say, as the person in training in this field, addiction is not a hopeless state. There is a lot of recovery and when you look at recovery from substance use addiction in comparison to other medical diagnoses, our recovery rates are better than cancer, diabetes, you can go down a whole long list of chronic illnesses that the chances for sustained recovery and wellness after substance use are. We have, quite frankly, better numbers, especially once you get to a year of continuous absence, if that's one's personal goal in their relationship to drugs and alcohol, Our outcomes are great. So I think the healthcare system, if you look at addiction without stigma, if you look at it as, is this person healthy? Are they connected and working on their mental health? Are they prioritizing their recovery? Is that an important part of their life? The same way that we can manage other symptoms and allow for donations, mental illness and mental disorders is just another one that we can respectfully take into account.

Laurie:

Yeah, absolutely, one that we can, you know, respectfully take into account. Yeah, absolutely. And look at the big picture of the person and their whole story, and you know them as a multifaceted human being and not just somebody with depression or a history of alcoholism. But looking at the whole picture, yeah. Do you have any advice for somebody who's trying to donate, who might have to jump through some extra hoops as they kind of define their mental health history to a transplant team?

Anthony :

Yeah, just be prepared for a little extra questions. Honesty is the best policy. They want what's best for you. Take the cautions seriously. I would not have, in 2018, made a good liver donor. I had been drinking again. I needed a long bout of continuous sobriety to be qualified for that. Continuous sobriety to be qualified for that. We don't get anywhere trying to lie or hide or distort the truth. If there is an area for concern, if you're not going to enough therapy or if you're not being compliant with your medication regime, if you're struggling with substance use disorders, use this input as an opportunity to kind of work on strengthening those issues. Lean into your treatment plans, lean on your providers, lean on your family and friends who want what's best for you.

Laurie:

That's excellent advice. You know it's the transplant team looking out for the best interests of the donor and it's just. I think patience is important and just understanding that they're here to help you and that they're on your team even if it feels like you have to jump through extra hoops.

Anthony :

Well said.

Laurie:

So let's talk a little bit about anxiety. One thing that makes me anxious is the thought of jumping out of an airplane. You don't share that with me, do you?

Anthony :

Well, I did for 11 years. I bought my first tandem to jump out of an airplane when I was 21 years old. I'd always wanted to skydive and I was so nervous the night before my tandem skydive I didn't set my alarm. I knew I wasn't going. I didn't answer the phone when they called, looking for me, I just pretended like it never happened. Fast forward four years later I'm now 25 years old. I'm going to jump out of an airplane for my birthday. This time I actually got 50 minutes of the 55 minute car ride to the trip before. I was so nervous that I pulled the car over. I had a couple of deep breaths to get my hands to stop shaking enough so I could turn around and drive home. I didn't even successfully make it there. I was 32 years old before I finally jumped out of my first airplane.

Laurie:

Wow, that took a long time.

Anthony :

It took a long time. I was hooked. The second I got out of the airplane. I was, you know, the guy was explaining to me how to get licensed before we even got to the ground. He told me when we landed that there are two types of people in the world and people who do this once and they've checked their bucket list item, and then the people for whom it becomes a way of life. And you know, I learned a lot, Laurie, and it was actually really helpful.

Anthony :

There's a lot of cliches about skydiving, but they're cliches because they're true. It's safe. It's outrageously safe. It's actually 22 times safer to jump out of an airplane than it is to get pregnant. If you look at comparable fatality rates, it is safer than kidney and liver donation.

Anthony :

Actually, as I was working up to making my kidney donation, it was what I learned about managing risk through skydiving that helped me understand how to approach something that I was scared of, that you can quantify risk, you can decide what your risk tolerance is, and then you just have to work with the emotions of fear. Fear is a great safety instinct. Fear has a default setting that is supposed to be overly protective, is to hold us back, but you can build a mental model for something and you can approach it in a safe way, even when it's dangerous. And yeah, skydiving gave me a chance to start working that muscle is dangerous, even when it and yeah, skydiving gave me a chance to kind of start working that muscle. That cliche of, like you know, there's no courage in the absence of fear right, we do things that are brave and courageous because we're scared, not because we're not scared. I was terrified of skydiving and I was for the first like 100 or 200 jumps, I think. I was nervous every time for a while there.

Laurie:

That's a lot of dives to be nervous on. Would you consider it a lifestyle too? I had a friend recently who said oh, so-and-so is exploring the double donor lifestyle and I kind of chuckled when I read the text. But I think it's kind of true. There seems to be a culture of people who are sharing multiple organs, doing multiple donations. What do you think? Is it a lifestyle?

Anthony :

Interesting.

Anthony :

I don't know if I thought about it as a lifestyle, because part of the reason I value the friendships with my fellow double donors is that there is a passion and a zeal for life that is palpable.

Anthony :

I feel like what connects me to my friends who are double donors has less to do with the organ donation. It has more to do with a life philosophy and when we see the donor athlete groups, that's a group of folks that they're hardworking, they're disciplined, they love to have fun with their friends, doing something that's good for the world and healthy for their bodies. At the same time, there's a theme there that the organ donation kind of makes sense, almost as a symptom of this core positive thing so you can be a part of the community, you can advocate, you can help educate. These are service-oriented, connection-oriented people trying to live authentic and meaningful lives first, and organ donation is a part of it. I don't know if I would think of many of the people as like oh yeah, they're organ donors and that's the lifestyle. So I think I flipped. The orientation Is that fair.

Laurie:

Yeah, that is fair. I recently had a guest who said we were talking about connectedness and he said something to the effect of he feels that organ donors often have that connection to the whole and therefore, when he's around other organ donors and they're feeling that connection to the whole and he's feeling that he feels connected to them.

Anthony :

That's beautiful.

Laurie:

It's the first thing we have in common, but certainly not the last thing.

Anthony :

Yeah, that sounds right. That captures it for me. By choice I don't have children, but generativity knowing that we're giving something to future generations is a big part of human beings' sense of satisfaction in life. It's such a privilege to be a human being, to be alive. To not pay that forward in reproducing Organ donation was a way that I got to kind of contribute to this common project of life. What a privilege I understand now telling my story that you can overcome depression, you can overcome addiction, you can be connected to others, you can build a life of meaning and purpose. That it's going to be hard but it's going to be worth it. And talking about my story and then seeing the different ways that that's helped people by normalizing, I think, mental disorders, normalizing recovery. It's a little bit of how I'm of service today and I'd like to share this with other people.

Laurie:

I didn't know that you kind of looked at this as a way of giving life that wasn't having a child, and that's something that I certainly feel as well, and it's nice to now meet a man who shares that, and it's a neat thing to be able to give life without giving birth. Well, is there anything else you'd like to share before we end today?

Anthony :

Our media and our news and our social media feeds are just filled up with all of the rough stuff, and you've collected and pulled some really beautiful stories through this podcast and through the rest of your life's work. You're putting a lot of good out there and I just wanted to say thank you for what you're doing. I admire it. I think it's really important.

Laurie:

Well, thank you so much for recording with me today. It's been fun to get to know you a little bit today.

Anthony :

Lori the same. Thank you for listening to me. I appreciate you creating a space for it.

Laurie:

Anthony's story shows how living donation can be an opportunity to thrive and to deepen your connection to others, but also to yourself. If your evaluation requires a little extra work due to your mental health history, try to be patient and remember the evaluation is designed with your best interests in mind, so don't take it personally. This season of Donor Diaries is proudly sponsored by GiftWorks, an organization dedicated to empowering organ recipients and living donors through education, advocacy and support. By helping patients share their journeys and connect with donors, giftworks ensures everyone feels supported throughout the transplant process. We're honored to partner with a team that's transforming lives, one transplant at a time. To learn more, visit yourgiftworkscom if you're enjoying this podcast.

Laurie:

Thanks for listening. I hope you tune in next month for another inspiring episode. Don't forget to follow us on facebook to join the conversation there, and be sure to subscribe so you know when we drop a new episode. Remember, every act of kindness creates ripples. Thanks for listening and keep spreading those positive vibes. This is Lori Lee signing off. I just want to feel the sunshine. I just want to feel the sunshine. I share this life with you. I share this life with you, thank you.

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