Belmont Cameli was almost 20 years old when he learned that Brendan Flaherty, his friend since childhood, needed dialysis every day. His kidneys were no longer functioning.
Cameli did not hesitate. He volunteered as a donor. But the tests at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital brought news no one expected: he was not compatible with his friend.
Anyone would have given up there. Cameli joined a paired kidney exchange program. The idea is simple and yet hard to believe: if your kidney does not work for the person you love, you give it to a stranger, and that stranger has someone who can save yours.
His kidney ended up in the body of a woman named Clotilde Ruiz. Clotilde’s daughter had tried to donate to her own mother and was not compatible either, so her kidney went to another patient in the chain. And so, link by link, among fourteen people who had never met, seven received a new kidney. Brendan was one of those seven. After years of waiting, he received the organ from a donor named Kimberly Cooper, someone he had never met. In 2018, Cameli described it with a phrase that sums it all up: it was a privilege to be able to donate an organ. Today he is known for the series Off Campus. But before any camera, he had already saved seven lives without knowing most of their names.
