Natasha Martin’s Kidney Transplant Fund

Hello all! My name is Haley and I am daughter trying to help her mother.

Easter 2008, my mom, Natasha Martin, was rushed to the emergency room. We learned that day she was in complete renal failure. I was 12 and my sister was 9. We didn’t quite understand the impact this moment would have on our lives.

Mama began dialysis treatments right away. The years that followed included countless surgeries, weeks spent in the hospital, and 4-5 hour dialysis treatments, three days a week.

If you’ve ever known someone who does dialysis, you know how exhausting it is. the treatment involves pulling blood from her body through one tube stuck in a vein, filtering it through a machine and then sending it back in through another tube in a different vein. Sounds tiring, right?

For 14 years she did this.. and very rarely did she complain. Throughout all of this, she thanked God for the opportunity to still be alive. To see my sister and I grow up, graduate, get married, have our first children. Modern medicine is a blessing in so many ways.

But then things started changing. Over the last several years, her access port started failing so she’d have another surgery to place another one, then another surgery to repair that one and so on and so forth. This was happening because her veins could no longer support these accesses. A doctor told her she only had about 2 years left and then there was nothing more they could do. There would come a time when she could no longer receive treatment and that would be it.

She had one other option-a kidney transplant. So, more surgeries, lots of testing, scans, and more testing later, she was made active on the kidney transplant list.

Thursday, September 8, 2022 we received the call she may have a donor. Saturday, September 10, we received the call that it was in fact a match and she needed to get to the hospital to await surgery. The next morning, she received a healthy kidney from someone who left this world too soon but blessed numerous families with their families’ sacrifice.

Sunday, September 11, 2022 was the day my mother was given another chance. An opportunity to watch her grandchildren grow. To have more grandchildren. To see her great nieces and nephews live their lives. A chance to live a life full, without dialysis, without exhaustion, without worrying about her next treatment.

With a successful transplant comes a lot of expenses. There are countless doctors appointments, bloodwork and many many medications to keep her body from rejecting the new kidney. The Georgia Kidney Foundation will match what we can raise, up to $10,000. So that’s our goal. $10,000 to help her with medical expenses and pharmacy expenses.

Our family has already been blessed 100 times over to even has this opportunity, for her to receive a transplant. We would be so so grateful for anything contributed and pray for the blessings of your families.

Thank you for reading my mother’s story and thank you for your contribution.