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DL Life Logo April 27,2012 - - - - 113,953 AMERICANS ARE CANDIDATES ON THE UNOS TRANSPLANT WAIT LIST DL Life Logo 91,996 waiting for a kidney DL Life Logo 16,098 waiting for a liver DL Life Logo 1,269 waiting for a pancreasDL Life Logo 2,153 waiting for a Kidney-PancreasDL Life Logo 3,172 waiting for a heartDL Life Logo 1,632 waiting for a lungDL Life Logo 52 waiting for a heart-lungDL Life Logo 278 waiting for small bowelDL Life Logo One organ donor has the opportunity to save up to 8 lives DL Life Logo One tissue donor has the opportunity to save and -or enhance the lives of 50 or more individuals DL Life Logo You have the power to SAVE Lives by becoming an organ, eye and tissue donor, so what are you waiting for? To learn how to register click HEREDL Life Logo

Sunday, December 25, 2011

'Chain of Life' organ donor effort has West Michigan links

The Grand Rapids Press | Tanya Gmiter

In a little less than two years, an altruistic organ donor effort dubbed “George’s Chain of Life” has criss-crossed the country — touching people in West Michigan. Six kidney recipients so far have been offered new life by six strangers who thereby became kin.

It’s named after 22-year-old George Shearer of Florida, who died of an infection in 2006 following a car accident. To honor him, his mother in 2010 donated a kidney to someone she didn’t know.

Earlier this year, the chain touched Alan West, an insurance executive who lives near Rockford. He was in the final stage of kidney disease when Suhad Shatara, a saleswoman at JC Penney in Grand Rapids, donated to him. Shatara’s brother, Samir Karadsheh, had also received a kidney.

But the chain didn’t end there. Alan West’s wife, Barb (they are the parents of Muskegon Chronicle Interim Editor Peg West), donated one of her kidneys to Linda Benson, a retired cosmetology instructor from Arizona. On surgery day, Parade magazine reports, the two women met by chance at a hospital elevator.

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