"I was called a couple times before that, ‘oh there's a match, there's a match' and I'd get all excited and then they'd be like ‘oh sorry, kidney was no good' or something went wrong."
It can be a heart-wrenching process. Prospective kidney recipients wait nationally three to five years for a kidney. The average time locally is 20 months. A key part of the process is finding a suitable match.
"Kidneys require a slightly closer match than any of the other organs. So when a donor becomes available, regardless of how long someone's been on the list, the blood type certainly has to be identical; be a match but then antibody screening has to be done to make sure that it's an appropriate match," says Barbara Miller, Director of Kidney Transplant for Lee Memorial Health System.
Read more and watch video: http://www.nbc-2.com/story/16961148/health-matters-living-organ-donors
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