In October, young wife and mother, Haley Allen, sent out a desperate plea for someone to save her husband’s life.
Noah Allen, 26, needed a kidney.
“We’re the Allen family,” Haley wrote in a blog she posted Oct. 15. “We’re made up of a hard-working dad, a stay-at-home mom, one precious baby boy and our second son on the way.
“We serve a selfless Savior who’s the glue that holds us all together. Yet, we’re searching hard for a certain missing piece in this little puzzle called life . . . We’re searching for a kidney for my husband.”
As a teenager, Noah had been diagnosed with “membranous nephropathy”–a type of kidney disease that normally sets in much later in life.
About a year after his diagnosis he was in clinical remission. He went on with his life, met Haley, got married, passed the bar exam and took a job in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Then in 2015, only a month after the birth of their first child, Noah’s symptoms returned.
His kidney was going “off the deep end,” Noah told the Charlotte Observer.
Medicine wasn’t working, remission was over.
Haley couldn’t just sit around and watch her husband deteriorate.
They asked for prayer from friends, family and their church family — and then Haley had a new idea.
When the couple learned that the best kidney would be from a living donor, Haley sat down and wrote the blog post that put everything in motion.
“This is where God has called me. And I need your help. I need prayer warriors. I need advocates. And I need a living donor. We don’t know who that living donor is just yet – maybe a family member, maybe a friend, maybe a Good Samaritan.
“But he or she is out there, and we are going to find him or her.”
Their modern day Good Samaritan was 25-year-old Wyatt Bardi. He and his wife Amy read Haley’s blog post. Amy barely knew Haley–from college and being bridesmaids in a mutual friends wedding.
Her husband Wyatt didn’t know the couple at all. To him, that didn’t matter. He saw donating a kidney as a way to live out his Christian faith–to be a loving neighbor–just as Jesus commanded.
Amy and Wyatt prayed, talked and educated themselves on the realities of kidney donation and then they replied to Haley’s Facebook post.
“Hi friend!” it began. “I’ve been keeping up with your blog and your amazing efforts to find a kidney for Noah. … My husband Wyatt has also been following along. He’s A+ and is ready to see if he’s a match for Noah,” Amy wrote.
A day or two later, Wyatt was tested and started filling out paperwork.
About a month into the process–a miraculous discovery.
There is something called a tissue typing test required before a kidney transplant. Donors are given three numbers, each judged on a scale of 1-10. Three zeros would signal the donor and donee are, genetically, identical twins. And 1-1-1 would be the numbers for genetic siblings.
Wyatt’s score: 1-1-1.
Noah and Wyatt began to refer to each other as “kidney brother.”
On March 14, 2017 Noah got Wyatt’s kidney, a date with a divine meaning for Wyatt’s wife Amy. It was supposed to be the due date for their baby–a baby she instead miscarried. The transplant she said, brought beauty from the ashes of their grief.
Both men faced a grueling recovery–Noah who’s developed a high tolerance for pain over the years, was up and moving before Wyatt–he broke down when he saw the pain his new friend was in.
“A piece of you is inside of me,” he told his kidney brother. “I’m alive because of you.”
Amy shared on Facebook that watching her husband go through the pain of recovery, pain he could have avoided–after all he wasn’t the sick one–she was reminded of Jesus.
The couples now share a deep bond, rooted in the sacrificial love that Jesus exemplified and they now live out.
Noah’s new kidney could be good for 20 years or more and Noah says he has every intention of living that long.
