On the outside, Dennis Gates and Janet Dixon don't seem like a very good match. He's married, she's single. He lives in Simi Valley, she lives near Hollywood. He's white, she's black.
On the inside, luckily, the two match very well. They both believe race shouldn't be a factor in friendship. They both belong to the same church. And they both have the same blood type.
And for Gates, that's a matter of his quality of life and the looming threat of an early death. Gates needs a kidney transplant, and this afternoon at UCLA Medical Center he will get one from his friend Dixon.
"I don't have the words to say how truly appreciative I am," said Gates, 31, who has four boys, ages 10, 8, 4 and 2. "That she is willing to go through with the surgery and put aside her life. . . . I'm just blown away by her heart."
The four-hour operation will mean a new life for Gates. If all goes well, he will be freed from his painful dialysis treatments, which, despite being life-sustaining, are not a true substitute for functional kidneys. For the past 2 1/2 years, Gates has spent three hours and 15 minutes--three times a week--hooked up to the blood-purifying machine.
"I can get really tired of dialysis," said Gates, who could only have expected to live another 15 years without a donor. "But if it weren't for it, I wouldn't be alive."
When the Los Angeles Church of Christ asked for volunteers to donate a kidney to Gates more than a year ago, Dixon remembers she reflexively signed up--along with 70 other people.
"I was like, 'Yeah, whatever. Put me on the list.' I was trying to be nice," Dixon said.
It seemed appropriate that Dixon, who met Gates in church about six years ago, would want to help. After all, Gates found her a job at his workplace after the Northridge quake shut down her former employer.
Still, it didn't seem quite real. The pair had since drifted apart. Dixon moved and began working in Hollywood. The seriousness of Gates' condition, however, became very real one evening about 18 months ago when Dixon visited the Gates home for dinner.
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"Dennis had always been in great shape," remembers Dixon. "But that night he was so pale, so skinny, so sick. I couldn't believe it. He's married, he's got young boys. It just broke my heart.
"That's when it hit me and I said, 'Oh, I guess I'm really doing this,' " she added.
