Organ transplants

WEST POINT — A phrase from the movie “Kung Fu Panda” defines how James Andersen plans to live the rest of his life, now that he can breathe a little easier.

OGDEN -- A motorcycle poker ride will be Saturday to benefit the family of Emalee Miller, a 9-year-old girl who needs a lung transplant.

COLLINS, Ohio -- Randy Wright has talked to almost everyone he meets about the demand for organ donors -- and his need for a kidney.

So when a Walmart clerk heard his plight and suggested the 45-year-old Huron County man join Facebook, Wright, with some help, began an awareness campaign on social media.

No one in Wright's family is a suitable donor, but at least two of his brothers, who have a different blood type than Wright, have agreed to donate to others as part of the paired donation concept. Wright, a father of three who has type O blood, is on the waiting list for a kidney at the University of Toledo Medical Center, which has been a pioneer in "chain donations."

MINNEAPOLIS -- It was an ordinary angiogram in the cardiac cath lab at the University of Minnesota Medical Center. But there was nothing ordinary about the tall technologist scrubbing in as part of the medical team.

"I've got this certain attachment to the hospital for some reason," joked Goffrey Duevel, 31, as he stood with -- or, more accurately at 6 feet 1, above -- several cardiologists, a nurse and lab technician readying the 79-year-old patient for transfer to a recovery room.

Duevel has been intimately familiar with this hospital for more than 25 years. At 5, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system that should have been the worst health challenge of his life. It wasn't. He endured a form of polio at 8, relearned how to walk and then, at 24, was told he had an enlarged heart, due most likely to the chemicals used to save his life as a boy.

After two open-heart surgeries at UMMC in 2007 to insert heart pumps, Duevel received a new heart in 2008. In the fall of 2009, he began studying at St. Cloud Technical and Community College in St. Cloud, Minn., to become a cardiovascular technologist (CVT), a program that includes a 16-week internship.

PEARL, Miss. -- The woman released from a Mississippi prison on the condition she donate a kidney to her sister says she would have gone through the procedure even if she hadn't been released from prison.