The nutritionist for the clinic came to visit with me about my dialysis diet and while chatting about my family’s history of kidney failure I mentioned our ties to Aurora, Nebraska.

She asked if she could tell me a story about the one time she’d been to Aurora. Seeing as I am stuck in a chair for 4 hours, I will take what I can get for entertainment.

 

Sometime around the 80s when she was in college at Kearney she was traveling back home to Hastings, when her car broke down just outside of – you guessed it, Aurora. This was before cellphones and so she was stuck on the side of the road. Until a kind man came along and offered to drive her to the gas station just inside town to use the pay phone to call her parents.

She told me their encounter always stayed with her because “he was so nice and he was SO happy because he had just received a kidney transplant after being sick for a long time.”

She now she works as a renal dietician for adult and pediatric patients, like me.

 

That nice man, who was so happy about his new kidney and to pay it forward by helping someone on the side of the road was my grandfather, John Thomas.

 

He was gifted a donor kidney in 1976, only six years after the first kidney transplant in Nebraska in 1970. He sadly passed away before I was born but yesterday was the reminder I needed that he and a few others are watching out from above.