Nathalie Ouellette and Marc Lacroix had been tellers at the same bank for years. Each was married, and the woman in each couple needed a kidney transplant. Husbands’ kidneys didn’t match their own wives’, but then Marc and Nathalie got to talking. What if Nathalie’s husband was a kidney transplant match for Marc’s wife and vice versa? And they turned out to be right.
“It’s rather unique that they aren’t related and figured it out for themselves,” said Michel Paquet, Ms. Laflamme’s kidney specialist and the Quebec representative on the advisory committee of the national kidney-transplant registry. “Statistically speaking, the odds of it working are highly improbable. But it worked for them. If you set out to find your own donor like that, it would never work.”