ALLENTOWN, Pa. – For nearly two decades, an Allentown teacher\u202f\u202flived with the fallout of complications from her pregnancies; a slow decline that eventually took almost all her kidney function, and the life she once knew.<\/p>\n
As she waited for a second chance at life, what she didn’t know is that someone she had never met was going to make it possible.<\/p>\n
“Almost 18 years ago now, and I had pregnancy complications, and I had preeclampsia, and it affected my kidneys from there,” Christy King explains.<\/p>\n
Christy King’s kidneys steadily declined. By 2021, she was in complete kidney failure, working by day and hooked up to home dialysis at night.<\/p>\n
“One of my main thoughts was my kids, so I just wanted to try to live as normal a life for them, get into a routine, and really being able to do home hemodialysis really helped me to be able to do that,” Christy says.<\/p>\n
While Christy waited on the transplant list, in another part of Pennsylvania,\u202fTiffany Weigle\u202fwas facing years of pain from\u202fnutcracker syndrome.<\/p>\n
Doctors told Tiffany the way to relieve the pain was to remove her left kidney.<\/p>\n
“So, they said the options are like we can, with the kidney once it’s removed, we can donate it to science, throw it in the bucket, or you can donate to another person,” Tiffany explains. “I immediately elected like, yeah, let’s donate it to somebody. It never even like crossed my mind that, like my kidney wasn’t bad, it was my plumbing that was bad.”<\/p>\n
Testing cleared her to become a donor, and doctors quickly found a match. A woman she’d never met: Christy.<\/p>\n
“I think this time it felt different,” Christy says. “It felt like it was actually going to happen this time. I was very emotional, just very grateful, very thankful.”<\/p>\n
The transplant was performed last November. Christy’s recovery brought her the energy she hadn’t felt in years; even as she faced another heartbreak just weeks after.<\/p>\n
“Four weeks after my surgery, my mom suddenly passed away,” Christy says. “The recovery became a little bit more difficult then. It was more emotional. But she was able to donate her liver through the gift of life.”<\/p>\n
Months after the transplant, the women finally met.<\/p>\n
“So I walked up and immediately hugged her and she just kept saying, you know, thank you, thank you, thank you,” Tiffany says.<\/p>\n
“Thank you to my donor for giving me a second chance at life,” Christy added. “I’m not really sure how you thank somebody for that, but, you know, I think she knows how grateful I am.”<\/p>\n
Both women say they feel stronger, and forever connected by one kidney and one act of generosity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – For nearly two decades, an Allentown teacher\u202f\u202flived with the fallout of complications from her pregnancies;…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,232,153,155,154],"class_list":["post-41323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown-area","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}