In June 2019, Steve Wilson was going on a bike ride. Like many of us often do, he checked his phone beforehand, and saw a moving post about his friend's daughter Linda." She was a junior in high school at the time; she just received a life-saving kidney(肾) from a woman in town," Wilson told CBS News." And they didn't even know this woman till they made the request for their daughter."
"So, I became emotional. I just thought that is the coolest thing," said Wilson, who lives in Westchester, N.Y." I took a long bike ride and I kept thinking, 'I would love to do something like that one day."
After seeing the post, Wilson selflessly decided to become a living donor himself, donating a kidney, while he was alive, to someone he didn't know.
"I knew it would go to someone. It eventually went to someone across the country," Wilson said." They took my kidney to the airport and flew it out to the W est Coast." He said he sill doesn't know the person who received his kidney and he probably never will, which he's fine with. He just wanted it to change somebody, s life, he said.
Going through an operation may seem frightening, but Wilson says all it takes is two weeks of one's life for recovery. And to prove that it isn't burdensome，Wilson and his fellow living donors finished an even harder mission: Conquering(征服) Mount Kilimanjaro.
"I do think that having that purpose made it a little bit easier. But there were some people一and I was one of them- who really ploughed hard to get through. And the purpose behind it was the reason why you just kept going," Wilson said.
The team reached the summit on March 10一symbolically, World Kidney Day. As for whether the climb to encourage living donations was worth it, Wilson said he inspired at least his friends to consider becoming living donors, but he thinks the Kilimanjaro summit could have inspired countless others.
