“I donated a kidney for my cousin. I made the decision for a few reasons, but mostly because she’s my cousin, and I love her. I know she’s been struggling a lot with this, and I want her to be happy.
“She’s only been married for a few years and they’ve got young kids, and I wanted to make sure she had a long, healthy, happy life to be able to spend with her kids and her husband.
"I didn’t have to think about it a lot. When we found out she needed one, my husband wanted to be evaluated to see if we could help her out. I told him I would be evaluated, too. It was really that simple.
“We did some research on our own to be sure we knew what we were getting in to before we made the offer to her. But after we researched it, we told her we would do it. There’s never really a doubt that we would do it if we were able to. The paired donation program just made it a lot easier for us to be able to go ahead with it.
“We knew that if we donated, it was very likely our kidney would be going to a stranger. Allison has a rare blood type and we already knew right off the bat we didn’t match her. We knew we would have to do paired donation right from the beginning.
“The information on the transplant was really great, and UAB was helpful through the whole process as far as keeping us informed of how it would go. It shortened the waiting list incredibly. She’s been on the waiting list for a deceased donor organ for years with no end in sight. We were on this waiting list for three months. It’s really been amazing.
“We thought we would be able to get her one within the next year or two, and they told us it could be a minimum of six months, and it turned out to be less than half of that.”
Courtney McLaughlin - 16
"She's been on the waiting list for a deceased donor organ for years with no end in sight. We were on this waiting list for three months. It's really been amazing."