When I decided on December 8, 2017 that I wanted to become an altruistic living liver donor – in fact, the night that I learned that it was possible to give someone a piece of your liver – I made that decision with the knowledge that, if I were so blessed to be able to move forward and save someone’s life, I might never have the opportunity to meet my recipient…or even to know if the transplant was successful.

In fact, I didn’t want to meet my recipient beforehand, but that’s another matter.

For me, my journey to become a living liver donor was a long one, not only involving a tremendous amount of medical testing, but, after that, an even longer wait to find a suitable recipient.  Having a rare blood type and some initial miscalculations in measuring the size of my liver limited the pool of potential matches. After a year of waiting, and with there being no national database for those in need of liver transplants, I had to begin searching for a recipient on my own, reaching out to hospital after hospital.

My liver donation would take place on July 5, 2019, over a year-and-a-half after I began my process. It was a profound and powerful experience, or, as I wrote the next day from my hospital bed “the perfect intersection between cosmic goodness and beautiful science, the crossroads of God and humanity.” And, as we say, Dayenu – that would have been enough.

And then, four days after the surgery, a nurse came into my hospital room asking if I would like to meet my recipient, as they were open........

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