I was just thinking back to a Labor Day weekend, seven and a half years ago. I’d just completed an annual event called the “Pound & Pedal” (which has a bit of a reputation in Central Kentucky), and was faced with a trivial choice: should I stick around to enjoy the post-race festivities or go home with my wife Dana?
Permit me to back up a little. In the P&P, two partners compete with other teams by alternating running and cycling— four five-mile legs for a race total of 20 miles. It’s fun if you get in shape for it. The guy who starts out on the bike drops it at the five-mile mark for his teammate, who picks it up and cranks it to the half-way point before his running cohort arrives. It works out best to have the stronger athlete start out on foot (similar to one of those mathematical story problems on an IQ test). With the exertion behind us for the day, my chum Roger had the blender fired up for the cactus juice, and the hot tub was being uncovered.
It was just about that time when we got the phone call. Bruce was going immediately into surgery. A matching kidney had become available. He’d made the nontrivial choice of accepting the sudden donation.
We dropped what we were doing and headed toward Lexington, with the full realization that another decision even more intense had been made at the same time. We found out later that the parents of a 13-year-old child (who’d reached the end of a life that was undeniably too short) had just given the difficult go-ahead to the ever-waiting organ harvesters…