Lee Cullum/ Dallas Morning News

If you want to feel better about a world gone mad, there is no better news than that of Yolette Garcia, news director at KERA-FM and, before that, head of public affairs programming for KERA-TV.

She started at the station as an intern and joined the staff not long after graduating from Wellesley College. A doctor's daughter from Corpus Christi, she was one of the few in her family not to choose medicine.

But medicine chose her. Born with tiny kidneys prone to infection, she early on lost all use of one of them. A year and a half ago, the other stopped functioning. Then began daily dialysis under the direction of Dr. Lauren McDonald.

Dr. McDonald has kept Ms. Garcia alive with a demanding procedure that every other day has withdrawn a pint of blood, cleaned it of toxins and then returned it to the body. Friends at KERA leapt to be helpful, driving her to the dialysis clinic.

But what really was needed was a new kidney.

Once again, a colleague at KERA stepped forward. The friend soon was caught up in a series of grueling tests at Baylor Hospital, set up for her by the Dallas Transplant Institute. These were tests of the kidneys, liver, heart and blood type, which had to be O. It didn't work. She was rejected.

Next appeared another potential donor, also at the station, with the same result. When all seemed lost, a friend in Albuquerque volunteered a kidney, but she, too, was turned down. Through all of those trials and errors, Ms. Garcia never missed a day of work except when hospitalized or in Corpus Christi to attend her father's memorial service.

By then, Dr. McDonald had put Ms. Garcia on another kind of dialysis, done at home, with a catheter hooked up to a machine that pumps solution into the lining of her abdomen and pulls out poisons for 10 hours while she sleeps.

But it is hard to get much rest, because the process can cause painful cramping.

Frantic to do something, a longtime friend in Providence, R.I., suggested that she put a notice in the Wellesley alumnae magazine trumpeting the urgent need of a fellow graduate in Texas for a transplant. The plea was answered, along with many prayers.

Elizabeth Hopkinson of Concord, Mass., telephoned. She said she had been a year behind Ms. Garcia at Wellesley and had lived in her dormitory. She didn't know Ms. Garcia very well but remembered Ms. Garcia had been president of the dorm.
Ms. Hopkinson's life hasn't been easy. A professional advocate for special-education students in the public schools, she has three children, the youngest of whom had serious seizures that required an operation to remove part of the brain. Yet she is willing to undergo an operation herself to give one of her kidneys to a former college classmate.
So it was down to Dallas in February for the punishing round of tests at Baylor Hospital. And while here, Ms. Hopkinson got together with Ms. Garcia.

They hadn't seen each other for more than 25 years. Over and over, Ms. Garcia asked this acquaintance from long ago, "Why are you doing this?" The answer: "Yolette, because I can. I want to help, and it's fine. You have to realize people want to help, want to give."

Just a few days ago, word came from Baylor: It is a go, probably in June.

Ms. Hopkinson's kidney will be removed through a small laser incision and settled into Ms. Garcia, lying in a room nearby, ready to begin again.

"It's a new life for me," said Ms. Garcia, one of 1,285 people in Dallas waiting for regeneration that only a transplant can bring.

April is Donor Awareness Month. Yolette Garcia is feeling especially aware of Liz Hopkinson.