Angels are real



And one of them is named Allison Batson.  She is pictured above with Clay Taber.  Clay is 23 and just starting life.  He is engaged to be married.  Allison is a transplant nurse.  Clay came into Allison's unit at the Emory University Hospital in a state of renal failure.  Clay had just graduated from Auburn University and gotten engaged.  So when he developed the night sweats, his Dad wrote it off as nerves, but he very quickly got worse.  He was diagnosed with a rare genetic autoimmune disease called Goodpasture syndrome which caused his body to start going after its own kidneys.  Quickly.  That was how he ended up at the hospital.  How he ended up on Allison's floor which is normally filled with post transplant operation patients is fortuitous happenstance.  The hospital was overbooked so they stuck the poor guy whose kidneys were failing and needed dialysis desperately in one of the free beds which happened to be in her unit.  They bonded.  Actually, Allison bonded more with his Mom.  She saw herself and her own kids in Clay and his Mom.  Once Clay was stabilized and the disease in remission, they put Clay on a transplant list from a cadaver.  He was behind 90,000 people nationwide who were already waiting.  Not quite the way Clay saw life unfolding when he graduated and got engaged a few months earlier.  Almost on a whim, Allison checked and found she was good match as a donor.  So she gave him one of her kidneys.  Allison is why I know angels are real.