/ NEWS / THURSDAY, APRIL 22. 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
HEALTH
Mayor donates kidney to Facebook friend in need
ASSOCIATED PRESS
HARTFORD, Conn.
Politicians long ago discovered the uses of Facebook. East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon found something else there; a constituent who needed her kidney.
Capone Almon, 35, had more than 1,600 "friends" on Facebook last year when she saw one of them. Carlos Sanchez, post a status update saying his friends and relatives had all been tested and couldn't donate a kidney.
She knew him casually through activities and friends in the New Haven suburb of East Haven, but they weren't so close that she had
heard he was ill.
Sanchez, a 44-year-old father whose kidneys were failing because of diabetes, sent out the request on
Facebook only hesitantly and on his doctor's suggestion. He worried people might pity him — and certainly hadn't pinned his hopes on finding a donor that way.
and just said, "Hey, I'll try. I'll get tested," Capone Almon said Wednesday. "I really felt from the very beginning that I was going to
"I thought she was joking. The mayor of East Haven would offer me her kidney?"
He didn't have long to wait. Capone Almon was the first person to respond.
"I sent him a private message
CARLOS SANCHEZ Kidney recipient
be a match and a donor, I don't know why, but I just knew it."
Sanchez had no such certainty.
kidney?" said Sanchez, an office administrator. "She responded back and said, 'I am serious, I am willing to get tested.'
"I thought she was joking. The mayor of East Haven would offer me, her
"I wasn't putting too much faith in it," he said. "I didn't want to get my hopes high. But at a point she made me feel so comfortable that I started feeling maybe this was meant to be."
Capone Almon, a Democrat, was running for second term as mayor at the time but kept the details of her medical plans a secret. She won the election as they awaited word on when she could donate the kidney, saying they grew as close as family during the lull.
"I know he voted for me, too"
she ioked.
The operation was set only after Capone Almon passed a battery of tests and was given a long explanation of the process, which involved
three small incisions near her ribcage and a scar similar to that of a cesarean section.
"What the doctors said to me is,
ent is already sick and were not going to make you sick to make him somewhatbetter," she said. "They do not compromise the donor's health in any way, shape or form."
8, when doctors at Yale-New Haven Hospital removed Capone Almon's left kidney and transplanted it into Sanchez.
"There's nothing special about me. Anybody can try to do this ... and you can really help someone."
APRIL CAPONE ALMON Mayor of East Haven, Conn.
They were released from the hospital in less than a week and are expected to make full recoveries. His insurance paid for both their surgeries, and the mayor is back on the job in this middle-class city
of about 30,000.
"Almost everybody says the same thing: I don't know if I would do that if it wasn't a relative ... but she said, 'No problem,'" he said.
"I remember saying, 'Wow, that's really something. I wonder if she's really thought through the fact that it might actually be a match," said Lawlor, the area's state representative to the General Assembly.
Capone Almon said that she fields questions almost daily from people asking whether she's worried her one remaining kidney might someday fail, but that she's confident enough in modern medicine and her own health — especially after the numerous tests — that she barely gives it a thought.
Michael Lawlor, an East Haven attorney and longtime friend of Capone Almon's, said she kept the details of her plans private for a long time, even as he and others quizzed her to ensure she recognized the serious nature of the donation.
"I don't want people to see this as something larger than life," she said. "There's nothing special about me. Anybody can try to do this, and if it's meant to be, you'll be a match and a donor and you can really help someone."
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