Newswise — Each Feb. 14, many women give men their hearts. This Feb. 22, Nik Mabry also will give her man a kidney.
The 21-year-old English and theatre double major at Middle Tennessee State University became intrigued with organ donation last year following the death of a friend and high school band mate in Clarksville, Tenn. Joey Ansberry died in a wreck on Aug. 11, 2004, his 18th birthday. While an organ transplant would not have saved Joey, Nik had discussed the subject with him at some length.
The product of a hardscrabble childhood in Sandy Hook, Ky., Angela Nicole Mabry grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing. Her father used a mule to plow the fields. He worked at a brickyard before disability ended that job. Her parents divorced when she was in third grade. She moved with her mother, brother and stepfather to Clarksville. After two years at Western Kentucky University, Nik moved to Nashville and transferred to MTSU.
In an Aug. 20, 2004 blog entry, she wrote, "I feel like I'm sounding rediculous (sic) "¦ like I'm anxious to give my body away "¦ but I'd just really like to find a way to help someone in need if I can only find out how."
The next day, a Vance, Ala., woman named Maggie responded on the blog site. She wrote that her 22-year-old son, Jesse, needed a kidney.
"I don't think you are riduculous (sic)," Maggie assured Nik. "I think you are a caring person, just like everyone else on here."
Earlier blog entries had revealed that in January 2002, Jesse Boyd began showing symptoms—shivering, pale skin, headaches, seizures. Initial misdiagnoses ranged from nerves to drug abuse. Jesse's brushes with death propelled Maggie into a frantic search for answers.
Jesse went into renal failure at a Tuscaloosa hospital and had to be transported to University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital, where he was diagnosed with thrombotic thrombocytopenic pupura (TTP), a rare and deadly blood disease. The illness played havoc with his kidneys. Jesse, a formerly athletic young man, began dialysis treatments, which he still endures three times each week.
Only 14 days earlier, Jesse had signed his organ donor card. The TTP diagnosis rendered it worthless.
Both of Jesse's parents are diabetic. They could not be tested. His brother proved not to be an organ donor match. Maggie's pleas only strengthened Nik's resolve to be tested in order to help Jesse.
"It would be so wonderful for my son to be able to have a semi-normal life," Maggie wrote. "For anyone to have to have dialysis done in this day and age of modern medicine is awful, but people don't know how much easier it is to become a donor than it was years ago."
"Five to 10 years ago, organ donation was a relatively new phenomenon and the donors were primarily family members," says Carol Smith, coordinator, College of Basic and Applied Sciences at MTSU. Smith worked as a researcher for the United Network for Organ Sharing in Richmond, Va., for six years.
"There is a huge discrepancy between the number of donors and the number of organs needed," Smith says, "and it's primarily due to the lack of donors."
According to the UNOS Web site, more than 87,000 people are on a waiting list for donor organs. As of Oct. 2004, 22,555 transplants had been performed and 11,762 donors had been registered.
"I don't understand why people wouldn't do it (donate organs) if they can," Nik says.
Why don't more people step forward?
"I feel that some people say, 'Hey, don't tempt fate,'" Smith says. "Some of it is pure distrust. Also, there's a certain mystique about medicine, and people are afraid of what they don't understand."
All Maggie understood was that her son was dying, and she would do anything to help him.
When Maggie informed Jesse of her cyberspace conversations with Nik, he decided to join the online discussion.
"I am completely numb most days," he wrote on Oct. 12, 2004. "It's as if i (sic) could care less about anyone or anything."
Writing directly to Nik, Jesse ventured, "I have never spoken to you. Why would you do something like this? "¦ I cant (sic) tell you how much this means to me. Even if you aren't able to donate it will still mean so much to me that you offered." Later, offline, Jesse would admit, "I thought (that) if my mom likes her, this chick must be some kind of a nut."
Nik, a petite girl with short, brown hair and a seemingly permanent smile, lives in Nashville and works at a local bank. She exudes an upbeat approach to almost any situation.
At six-foot-three, Jesse sports three spikes in his lower lip and other piercings in his ears and above one eye. His hair is short now after having shorn 16 curly blond inches for Locks of Love, the organization that provides hair to cancer patients who lose their tresses to chemotherapy. He likes alternative rock and loves Auburn University football, which puts him in the minority in the Tuscaloosa area.
Since Nik had to undergo an electrocardiogram (EKG), an angiogram and a glucose tolerance test at UAB, Jesse finally had an opportunity to meet her on Dec. 7, 2004.
"When I looked into her eyes my heart almost melted so I couldn't do it but once ("¦) all the other times I would look at the corner of her glasses," he gushed on the blog site. "Never in my life have I hugged anyone I just met until today. I was more nervous meeting her than I have been anyone in my life."
Hours and hours of intense conversations later, Nik and Jesse fell in love. Two days later, doctors confirmed that Nik and Jesse were a match—for the transplant.
"He's a beautiful person with a beautiful soul," Nik wrote on the blog site on Dec. 12. "He's got a wonderful personality and an amazing smile. He's got the biggest heart "¦ and he's brave "¦ and he's loving and gentle and caring and smart. He loves his family more than anything in this world."
The son of a coal mining father and a mother who raises Boston terriers, Jesse confesses to having "done some things I shouldn't have been doing" in the past and writes poetry to give voice to his feelings. He projects a "don't mess with me" air, but Nik says it's only a façade.
"He's really very gentle," she says. "He won't kill animals, not even a ladybug."
In fact, Jesse is concerned about the quality of life Nik will have following the transplant.
"If she has to have dialysis because of me, then I'll be upset," he says.
Nik says she has no fears about living life with one kidney.
"If that's what I have to do, I'll do it."
ATTENTION, MEDIA: For more information about organ donation, contact the United Network for Organ Sharing at http://www.unos.org. For specific information about kidney donation, contact the National Kidney Foundation at http://www.kidney.org.
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