Here's looking at you, kidney
Gal meets her 9/11 hero organ donor
She has one of his kidneys. Now, he has a piece of her heart.
In December, 9/11 hero firefighter Kevin Shea gave the gift of life to a total stranger: Lois Knudson, a 60-year-old special-ed teacher from Orange County, Calif., who was in desperate need of an organ transplant.
On Thursday, the two met for the first time.
“Thank you! It’s great to finally meet you in person!” a teary-eyed Knudson said as she hugged Shea in The Post’s Midtown offices.
The embrace lasted almost a full minute as Knudson clung to her savior.
“It’s kind of late now!’ the quirky former firefighter quipped, adding, “It’s really good to meet you too.”
An emotional Knudson teased: “You messed up my makeup,” playfully adding, “He’s cute! Good looking guy!”
“I did lose 5 pounds,” the 51-year-old Shea joked, referring to the weight of his now-gone left kidney.
Knudson suffered from a degenerative, always-fatal kidney disease that runs in her family — which killed both her sister and mother. She had been on a waiting list for an organ for four years and on dialysis for 15 months. Fourteen different friends or family members had tried to give their kidney to her without success.
Shea, a third-generation firefighter from Long Island, had miraculously survived Sept. 11, 2001. He had just gone off-duty after finishing a 24-hour tour with Ladder 35 that morning but went back to work when the fateful alarm sounded. He was just outside the South Tower when it collapsed. His body battered and neck broken, Shea was found uncon- scious lying amid the twisted steel and crushed concrete near Albany and West streets. He was the only one of 13 members of his Upper West Side fire station to make it out alive.
He was looking to pay his good fortune forward and signed up for a program that allows living people to donate organs to anonymous individuals. He filled out a series of online questionnaires with the National Kidney Registry.
Knudson got the lifesaving phone call that a match had been found two days before Thanksgiving, but she didn’t know anything abut the donor.
She was eligible for Shea’s donation only because her niece, Jessica Ellis, also donated her kidney to a stranger as part of a national “chain” of altruistic donations.
The SoCal resident, who grew up in New York City admiring firemen, got her Hollywood ending on Dec. 5.
Shea had his transplant surgery at New York-Presbyterian/ Weill Cornell Medical Center and his kidney was packaged in a medical cooler, driven to Kennedy Airport and put on a commercial flight to Los Angeles. It was delivered to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, where doctors gave Knudson her gift of life.
Following Post inquiries, Shea agreed to tell his story and Knudson signed consent forms that allowed the teacher and retired firefighter to finally learn each other’s identities.
“It was more emotional than I thought,” Knudson told The Post afterward.
Asked if she considered Shea a friend for life, the married teacher gushed, “Absolutely. Whether he wants me or not. He’s stuck with me!”