Emily Chan
A woman from Missouri secretly donated one of her kidneys to her father, who had been suffering from end-stage renal disease.
And after the transplant surgery, she revealed to her father that she was his kidney donor, moving him to tears.
Delayne Ivanowski (@delayne_i) was the woman who made this ultimate sacrifice for her father, John Ivanowski. As his daughter, she wanted to do everything in her power to give her father more time with his family.
End-stage renal failure is a serious disease. According to John Hopkins Medicine, it is the final stage of chronic kidney disease when the kidneys’ condition has declined to the point of no longer functioning independently.
The National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion estimates that about thirty million people in the U.S. suffer from chronic kidney disease.
John had been battling kidney issues for a few years. Then, one day, a lab test confirmed that he was in kidney failure and would most definitely need a kidney transplant soon.
As the months went on, he grew sicker and more lethargic. Finally, after another lab test with terrible results, John’s doctor ordered an emergency catheter to be placed inside his chest so he could begin dialysis.
Dialysis is the process of manually removing extra fluid and toxins from the blood since the kidneys can’t do the job themselves. So John was forced to go to a dialysis center and sit hooked up to a machine for hours.
Fortunately, dialysis helped improve John’s well-being, and eventually, he was able to learn how to do dialysis treatments at home.
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