Please help Jenna find a kidney donor. She is blood type O

Jenna is 26 years old and is wait listed for a transplant but without a living donor she could wait for many years. She is blood type O.

We created a Facebook page to help our daughter Jenna find a kidney donor. Please share this page--even if we don't find a match for her, we can help someone. 

The eldest of our 4 children, Jenna, has a rare urological defect that destroyed her kidneys. She began dialysis as a senior in high school, and it continued for more than 3 years until she received a kidney transplant 5 1/2 years ago. That kidney is now failing, and Jenna will have to start dialysis again soon.

The statistics are not in Jenna's favor: more than 97,000 people in the U.S. are waiting for kidney transplants. The list grows by nearly 7,000 patients a year. Fewer than 17,000 kidneys are transplanted annually. Most come from accident and stroke victims or living relatives.

About 1,800 a year come from other unrelated donors, mostly family friends.

Rejection of the original kidney transplant produced fighting antibodies. These antibodies have now made her sensitized to certain donors - making it difficult to find a match. It is now necessary to find a pool of eligible living donors to increase her matching odds. It's also possible for a willing (but non-matching) donor to enter a paired donation program and by donating on Jenna's behalf, she would get a kidney in return. 

Please learn more about living donation please visit Living Donors Online http://livingdonorsonline.org/ldosmf/index.php?board=9.0

For more info about being tested to match Jenna please call Ashley - the Living Donor Intake Specialist at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla - (858) 554-4363 - tell her the patient is Jenna Franks. Our email is: kidney4jenna@yahoo.com - Thank you!

Follow Jenna's quest on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WantedKidneyDonor 

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