Facebook creates kidney connection
NEW YORK (AP) - February 18, 2008 "He's giving me something not too many people would give,"
Ricardo Manier, 21, said of his friend Karl Celestin. The
transplant surgery is set for Tuesday at a Manhattan hospital, the
Daily News of New York reported.
The two were close friends and classmates at Holy Family School
in Queens until Manier's family moved to California in 1996, after
his eighth-grade year. They soon lost touch.
Manier has focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a kidney-scarring
disease that often causes chronic kidney failure, according to the
National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health's
Medline Plus Web site. He has been hospitalized repeatedly since he
was 5.
Nonetheless, he was a premed student at a California college
until June, when his kidneys virtually stopped working, he said.
During his six-week hospitalization, the networking Web site
Facebook served up Celestin's name.
The two soon got together in New York, where Manier now lives.
Celestin, a student at a medical school in the Dominican
Republic, said he volunteered for the kidney donation because it
pained him to see his old friend's similar ambitions delayed by his
condition, which led to dialysis three times a week.
"I put myself in his shoes," Celestin said.
Manier now hopes to join him at his medical school in the fall.