When we were teenagers, my brother and I received kidney transplants six days apart. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He, two years older, was scheduled to receive my dad’s kidney in April of 1998. Twenty-four hours before the surgery, the transplant team performed its final blood panel and discovered a tissue incompatibility that all the previous testing had somehow missed. My brother was pushed onto “the list,” where he’d wait, who knows how long, for the kidney of somebody who had died and possessed the generous foresight to be a donor after death. I was next in line for my dad’s kidney. We matched, and the date
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