Via WebMD – On a warm summer day in June, Amy Nadel sat in a waiting room at Johns Hopkins as one of her children was coming out of the operating room and another was preparing to go in. And in a similar room in another part of the hospital, another family was sitting through the same thing. They were linked not by coincidence, but by one lifesaving thing they were about to trade: kidneys.

Nadel’s son Jonah Berke had just had one of his kidneys removed, where it was rushed across the hospital in a sterile cooler to be transplanted into an anonymous recipient. At the same time, her daughter Rachael Moskowitz was ready to receive a kidney that had just come from an anonymous donor somewhere else in the hospital. You’d be forgiven for thinking this sort of thing only happens in a Grey’s Anatomy episode. But this dramatic process, called kidney paired donation (KPD), is one of the ways people may receive kidney transplants.

Nadel’s kids were one pair in this sort of donation. Jonah had decided to donate to benefit his sister Rachael, after she had gone through years of complicated health battles. After untold doctors’ appointments, numerous surgeries, and countless hours worrying for Rachael’s well-being, the whole family arrived at Hopkins with hope and a fully loaded Netflix queue, ready for a new chance at life.

Read the rest of Domino Donation: A Kidney to Save Two Lives Instead of One here.