f(red)erick and stephanie

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"All You" Article from July 2004 --
Frederick couldn’t believe what he was seeing. On his computer screen was an e-mail from Stephanie, an old friend from high school in Greenbelt. “I thought she was dead”, explains Frederick, 42, who has known Stephanie since the fifth grade. The two had lost contact with each other after high school graduation, then, during college, he had heard a rumor that Stephanie had died from kidney problems.
Stephanie, very much alive, had written Frederick about a class reunion he was organizing. “I had no idea about the rumor”, says Stephanie, now 43. “But it was great to get in touch with Frederick – he was my first kiss.” So much had happened since they had last seen each other.
Stephanie had been in good health her first year of college when she began to suffer from fatigue, blurry vision and horribly painful menstrual periods. She thought it was stress, but her symptoms got worse, so she went to the infirmary and was told she had a bad case of the flu. Dissatisfied with the diagnosis, she went to the hospital and found out her blood pressure was a whopping 280/240.
Tests revealed that her kidneys had shriveled to the size of acorns and were not functioning. Because of her critical condition, she was moved up the transplant list and received a cadaver kidney in June 1981.
After Stephanie recovered she finished college, married and had a daughter, Megan, in 1993. But soon after Megan’s birth, both her marriage and her donor kidney started to fail. When she sent Frederick that e-mail in 1999, she was a single mom. And she was on the transplant list again.
Frederick and Stephanie started dating, but she said nothing about her rapidly deteriorating condition until one particularly bad day. “When I confessed to Frederick, he immediately said, ‘Let me give you a kidney.’ “ She refused his offer, but Frederick wanted to help the woman he was falling in love with, so he got tested, secretly, for suitability. When Stephanie had another bad day, he revealed that, against the odds, he was a match.
Stephanie was reluctant to have Frederick go through surgery, so she decided to wait for a kidney from the donor list. That summer, Frederick proposed. Stephanie said yes, then Frederick insisted she let him donate his kidney. “I begged her”, says Frederick. “Here I find out you’re still alive and realize you’ve been the love of my life from the start. Please don’t let me lose you now”.
“As soon as I got Frederick’s kidney, I could feel the life flowing back into me”, Stephanie says. The couple married in July 2002 and live near Greenbelt with Stephanie’s daughter, now 11. “Megan calls Frederick her hero”, says Stephanie. “And he’s mine, too”.