Doug Ransdell received a kidney from Samantha Simmons, his daughter’s best friend. Last week, donor and recipient, along with their families, celebrated the five-year anniversary of the surgery and the new lives it has given Ransdell and Simmons.

On April 29, 2011, Ransdell was flown to Kootenai Medical Center, where the medical staff began to treat him as if he’d had a heart attack. Doctors soon realized the treatment wasn’t correct and began a battery of tests. They discovered Ransdell was suffering from a condition known as “aortic dissection.” An aortic dissection occurs when the force of blood pumping can split the layers that make up the artery wall. This causes blood to leak between the layers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“That was a pretty hard hit on the body, and it expedited kidney failure,” Ransdell said. A year and a half passed: Ransdell didn’t have a kidney and was running out of hope. “Sam came forward after about 18 months and [my daughter] Lindsey called and said she had a living donor, which is about the only way the surgery would work.”

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In the United States, 121,678 people are waiting for organ transplants. Of these, 100,791, or 82.8%, are waiting for a kidney, National Kidney Foundation data show. An individual on the waiting list can expect to wait three to five years for a suitable kidney to come available through normal medical channels. Donations, on the other hand, can mean a nearly immediate transplant. Living donors provide about 6,000 organs each year, the CDC said.

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Simmons saw her best friend struggling with the potential loss of her father. So she offered to donate her kidney.

“She never really asked me,” Simmons said of her bestie. “It was just basic conversation between two friends that he was sick and that the only way he would probably survive is from a living donor because he would have to wait on the kidney list and some people never get a kidney on the list.”

Simmons had a special empathy: She lost her own father to liver cancer in 2002. She recognized the pain Lindsey was in, and she offered to undergo testing to see if her kidney was a match for Doug.

On Dec. 24, 2013, Ransdell received a Christmas gift he will never forget: Simmons was a match. He would receive a transplant.

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Every 10 minutes, a new name is added to the national transplant waiting list, the American Transplant Foundation reports. One in nine U.S. citizens has kidney disease. The National Kidney Foundation says that friends or other unrelated, non-anonymous donors are the most likely to donate a kidney. In 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, 1,278 non-family members donated kidneys to those in renal failure.

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Ransdell’s surgery took place at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane. It lasted more than seven hours, longer than a nonstop flight from New York to London. In 2018, Sacred Heart Medical Center performed 36 kidney transplants, four from living donors. As of last week, 211 people were on the kidney transplant list at Sacred Heart. For the first two months after the procedure, Ransdell had weekly kidney check-ups. Then monthly. Now, he goes to the doctor four times a year.

A kidney from a deceased donor, on average, can improve the quality of life for its recipient for eight to 12 years. A kidney from a living donor, on the other hand, can function for 12 to 20 years, according to statistics from Donate Life America.

“I have five down,” Ransdell said, “and I feel like I have about 15 years coming,”.

Simmons lives in Burlington, Ky., near Lindsey Ransdell Parece. The two visit Parece’s family in Coeur d’Alene whenever they have the chance. Simmons said she and Doug keep in touch. He has a photo of Simmons with his wife and daughter as the screensaver on his cellphone.

“I’ve got my three favorite girls right there, where I can always see them,” Ransdell said.

Simmons dismissed her generous donation as just another case of someone helping a friend.

“I’m rocking one kidney,” Simmons said, “and he is rocking life.”