She said it as if nothing could shake her confidence in human beings

She said it as if nothing could shake her confidence in human beings. Christine was teaching me optimism: without using these words, she taught me that people are good, that I should never doubt it.”But how about yourself? Were you afraid of the surgery?” She brushed off the suggestion with a wave of her hand “No, no, I did not even consider any complications I am very healthy No. Tori said, just the other day, that she, too, would like to donate a kidney when she turns 18!”Then I asked her: “Christine, what if one of your kids should one day need a kidney?”"I would hope somebody would come forward to help, as I did,” Christine said. “Did you tell them about the surgery? Were they afraid?” I asked her “My kids are my life. I would never do something that would leave them without a mother,” she said “I told them: ‘Your mom is healthy. I am helping someone who lives with the help of a machine.’”I saw that they were a bit worried, but in their school classes they said they were proud of me. Was it her kidney? Or was it mine now?Christine’s children, Sean, 11, and Tori, eight, were at school, her husband was at work.

It was a very strange feeling to sit opposite a person, a part of whom is in you. I did not feel the kidney itself, just the incision, still fresh but no longer painful Ten days had passed since the surgery. We sat in the dining room, not yet friends because we knew so little of each other, but there we were face to face, donor and recipient That’s who I was to her, a recipient of her kidney As I sat there, I touched my belly. Her answer was disarming: “Yes, just like that,” she said, as if there was no need for an explanation of such an act.But I needed to understand why she did it, because for me the comprehension of her act was a part of accepting her gift.I asked her again the next time we met She had invited me to her house in a suburb of Providence. When she read the article she thought: “I could save someone’s life.” “Just like that?” I asked her, still incredulous, even though her kidney was already in my body She was silent for a moment. For a moment I was even proud of being a journalist, in spite of the cynicism we journalists often develop.Christine was one of these five women.

I was amazed that one single story could have had such an effect. After reading that report in the paper, five women and two men volunteered to donate their kidneys in the same hospital. She wanted to donate her kidney and went to the Rhode Island Hospital because she had heard that its transplant surgery department had such a programme.Her kidney, doctors decided, fitted a 65-year-old man, Albert Raposa. On that day the local newspaper, The Providence Sunday Journal, published a long report about a 21-year-old altruistic donor called Kristy Olivet. Above all, I wanted to know why she had made the decision.The story of my second transplant really begins on 11 July 2004. It was as if she had been the judge who decided it was to be me.I wanted to know so much about Christine, about her family – she told me she had a husband and two children – and how she had decided to become a donor. I guess I wanted to prove to her somehow that I deserved her kidney, that I had suffered enough all these years.