Gary, a security guard from Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent, stumbled upon Karen’s post by chance and felt he had to help.<\/p>\n
“I saw Karen’s appeal and she mentioned the children, and I thought ‘Karen’s a similar age to my daughter and her youngest child is the same age as my grandson’, and I just thought it’s terrible for the children,” he said.<\/p>\n
“If It was my daughter, I would be searching everywhere if we had exhausted all avenues through the family and friends, I would want a stranger to come forward. And I thought it would be selfish not to.”<\/p>\n
He added: “I thought this lady needs one of my kidneys more than I need two of them.”<\/p>\n
Although, Gary, 60, had never met Karen, he immediately volunteered to be tested.<\/p>\n
He underwent extensive assessments, including compatibility testing, psychological evaluations, blood tests, cholesterol checks and other medical examinations.<\/p>\n
The pair then underwent the six-hour procedure on 15 July at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff. <\/p>\n
Gary said he never had any second thoughts.<\/p>\n
He added: “It’s amazing seeing Karen today, the first time since the transplant and looking so well.<\/p>\n
“For me, donating a kidney is simply up there with getting married and having my children, it’s one of the top three things in my life.<\/p>\n
“And she’s a very deserving lady and a deserving family.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gary, a security guard from Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent, stumbled upon Karen’s post by chance and felt he had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":774326,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-774325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}