‘Will she want a gay kidney?’
Organ donor site matches ill woman, ‘earth angel’
In a surgery planned for Tuesday, a high school English teacher from North Carolina will donate a kidney to a Boston mom she met on the Internet about a year ago, a life-giving tale of lesbian sisterhood that she chronicles lightheartedly in her blog.
Jen Denis of Greensboro, N.C., will give her left kidney to Rene Miranda, who has lived for eight years with end-stage renal disease, meaning she needs dialysis three days a week - or a donated organ - to stay alive.
The two - who met on Matchingdonors.com, a Web site that helps match patients with altruistic organ donors - could understandably have had many worries when they first began messaging each other late last summer. But one topic was foremost in the thoughts of both: Would discovering that the other is gay be a deal-breaker?
“I did not know Rene was gay before I contacted her,” Denis wrote in her blog. “My thought was, ‘Will she really want a gay kidney?’ ”
Miranda - whose partner, Nancy Norman, is medical director of the Boston Public Health Commission - described her first chatter with her donor on the blog: “I was afraid she would not want to give her kidney to a lesbian, and she thought I would not want her lesbian kidney! Needless to say we bonded after that great exchange. Jen Denis is my earth angel!”
The blog has served as a meeting place for donor and recipient - and for their families and friends - as they share a journey leading up to Tuesday’s surgeries at Massachusetts General Hospital.
They write that Miranda received a membership to Matchingdonors.com in January 2009 as a gift. Denis started browsing the site last summer after hearing about it.
“I always knew that the list of people waiting to receive organs far exceeded the number of organs that come available each year, but I never knew how staggering those numbers are,” she wrote in May.
The tone of Miranda’s profile on the site struck Denis. “She described her kidney disease as only one aspect of her life.” Focusing on her teenage son, a classic rock fan, Denis wrote. “I also thought it cool when I read she had promised to take her son . . . to Paris after her transplant so that they could visit Jim Morrison’s grave.”
Friends and family, gathering in Boston this weekend to help with the pair’s recoveries, have taken a cue from Denis and Miranda, chiming in on the blog with good-natured teasing.
Asked to provide song suggestions for a “pre-transplant playlist,” one snarky aunt suggests “The First Cut is the Deepest” and “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.”
Mostly, they offer strong support.
Denis’ father, Jeff Denis, wrote, “I tell people about what my daughter is doing and they tell me I should be very proud. . . . She is a wonderful person and I guess that I am getting a new daughter since Rene will have some of my DNA. Welcome to the family, Rene.”
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