I can’t believe I missed this story a couple weeks ago. But with a cheerful wave of the deacon’s stole to Charm City blogger Fr. Austin Murphy (who saw it first), I happily post this account, from the Baltimore Sun, of an astonishing act of multiple generosity:

It all started when a Virginia man read his church bulletin one Sunday. A woman from his parish, someone he had never met, needed a kidney. Thomas F. Koontz, grateful that God had recently saved his teenage daughter from brain cancer, offered her one of his.

When the woman found a more suitable donor, the 54-year-old retired Marine called Johns Hopkins Hospital. Was there someone else, he wondered, who might need his kidney?

Koontz’s selfless act started a chain of events that would allow not just one person to get a desperately needed kidney but eight people to get new organs to keep them alive and thriving.

Surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital held a news conference Tuesday to announce that they – along with doctors at hospitals in Oklahoma City, St. Louis and Detroit – had just completed an eight-way, multi-hospital, domino kidney transplant. In addition to Koontz, this record-setting swap involved seven pairs of people – each made up of one person in need of a kidney and one willing to donate to them, but whose blood or tissue type was incompatible.

A computer program was fed all of the potential donor pairs and devised a complicated exchange that took place over the past three weeks, with several kidneys being flown around the country. At the end of the line was a woman whose kidneys were weeks from shutting down but had no donor; she completed the puzzle when she received her kidney at Hopkins Monday night. She was the ultimate recipient of Koontz’s largesse.

“At the end of the chain, that kidney still goes to someone in great need,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery, who led the transplant team at Hopkins. “But along the way, you’re able to accomplish two, three, four, eight transplants. …

“These are all ways of trying to optimize the number of people who are able to receive life-saving transplants.”

Continue at the link for the rest.