A White Sox fan wore her plea for a kidney to games for two years. A teacher in Virginia answered it

A White Sox fan who spent two seasons wearing a plea for a kidney on T-shirts at the ballpark met the stranger whose kidney she now carries, at a game at Rate Field on Saturday, NBC Chicago reported on Monday, two years after the station first aired her search.

Christine Todd, of Plainfield, Illinois, has polycystic kidney disease, in which fluid-filled sacs take over the kidneys and can lead to kidney failure, and she needed a living donor, according to the report by NBC Chicago's Regina Waldroup, who covered her story from the start. Todd took her search to the home of the White Sox, with the plea printed on T-shirts and a banner.

The T-shirt

Nearly 4,000 people in Illinois are waiting for a kidney, the station said, and Todd was not prepared to wait her turn quietly. By the time she went to the ballpark her kidneys had swollen to roughly the size of a football, Transplant News reported. She wore the ask across her chest at home games, in front of thousands of strangers, and after NBC Chicago aired it a couple of potential donors came forward.

One of them was a perfect match. Chris Beck teaches biology at James River High School in Midlothian, Virginia, about 700 miles from Chicago. He had never met her.

His mother sent it

"My mom, she shared the social media post with me," Beck told the station. He had donated part of his liver to someone in 2020, and his mother had been excited about that. "She was like, 'Hey, here's someone else who needs help.'"

He did not have to travel to Chicago. He went to the donor centre near his home, said he wanted to become a donor and named the person he wanted to give to. The surgery took place in Richmond, and the kidney was put on a flight to Chicago, where Todd received it. Arrangements like that run through the National Kidney Registry, which lets a living donor give near home while the organ is shipped to a matched recipient at another transplant centre, Hoodline reported.

Saturday

Two years on, both are well, and on Saturday they went to a Sox game together, back at the ballpark where the story began. "I am here today at Sox Park again because of Chris," Todd said. "Saying thank you is not good enough. There was a lot of uncertainty until you came along. I never believed in miracles before, but I do believe that this was a miracle."

Beck put it more plainly. "If I can do something to help another person, I definitely will do it," he said. "It is what I would want done for me or any of my kids."

Todd was not the first Sox fan to find a kidney in the stands. Lisa Polk found her living donor sitting in front of her at a game, someone she had known for 23 years, and the two had their surgeries in September 2022, CBS Chicago reported at the time. Harold Baines, the White Sox Hall of Famer who has had a kidney transplant himself, later met both women at the ballpark.