The Happy Pod: Donating my kidney transformed a child's life

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Speaker 4 This is the Happy Pod from the BBC World Service.

Speaker 4 I'm Vanessa Heaney, and in this edition...

Speaker 5 I was crying, his mom was crying. It was just lovely to see him so happy and healthy.

Speaker 6 My tears could not stop. I could not stop giving her a hug.
Yeah, he is an angel.

Speaker 4 A woman who donated a kidney to a stranger has met the young boy whose life she saved. A new technology could dramatically increase the number of available organ transplants.

Speaker 7 The impact of this product is typically increasing the number of organs that are being transplanted something between 20 and 30 percent.

Speaker 4 Also, a media platform run by and for young people with disabilities that's hoping to challenge misconceptions. Plus, a Grand Prix for cows and an unusual group of knitters.

Speaker 8 It genuinely makes it easier to go through life having that thing to do with my hands. And it has made it so much easier for me to connect with the society.

Speaker 4 We start the program with a rare meeting between an organ donor and the young boy whose life she saved.

Speaker 4 Ali Coyle had agreed to donate one of her kidneys to a stranger, and she was matched with five-year-old Xavier.

Speaker 4 It's unusual for living donors to meet those who receive their organs, as very little information is shared.

Speaker 4 But Ali, who's 40 and from Northern Ireland, wrote to the boy's family and included a toy plane from the airline she works for as a pilot.

Speaker 4 They used that information to track her down and got in touch via social media. Xavier's parents, Hira Zahir and Uma Saeed, who live in London, explained why it was important for them to meet her.

Speaker 6 It was a roller coaster ride for us, to be honest. Xavier, previously, I remember he used to not eat well.
It was a struggle for me, giving him medicines, giving him food. He was not growing properly.

Speaker 6 But after the transplant, life changed. He is here, all healthy, happy, running around.
No one can tell by looking at him that he got his kidney transplant just this year

Speaker 6 yeah luckily he's like uh very energetic after the transplant surgery even uh after the transplant a couple of months he had like a sports day and he won first prize in throwing and he said that i can run really fast after that surgery i really wanted to meet in person and thank that person when she sent a card literally my tears could not stop stop uh it was beautiful moment to receive a card from her and then finally we were lucky enough to meet her she's part of her family now

Speaker 10 she was an angel to us to be honest

Speaker 6 literally when i met her my tears could not stop i could not stop giving her a hug instantly it felt like i'm meeting a sister yeah he is an angel And she is very, very nice person, to be honest.

Speaker 10 She's very nice.

Speaker 6 You know, when we were not finding a match, we were hopeless. We were helpless.

Speaker 6 And I believe it is very, very important to spread this awareness that one kind gesture of a person, how it can change lives of so many people, to be honest. Literally, yeah.

Speaker 6 She just donated the kidney to my son, but it changed life of our whole family, to be honest. I cannot thank her enough for her kind gesture and for the kindness she did.
She changed our life.

Speaker 4 Ali was inspired to donate her kidney after failing to match with a friend who needed a transplant. And Xavier's father, Uma, also donated a kidney to another patient.

Speaker 4 Ali spoke to the BBC's Stephen Watson.

Speaker 5 I just thought, you know, if it was someone in my family who needed a kidney and someone could donate to them, then I would want them to do that.

Speaker 5 So I just thought, well, if I was going to donate to one person, I might as well donate to another.

Speaker 1 And how did you feel when the family got in touch?

Speaker 5 To be honest with you, I was delighted because I was very curious about them. Obviously, it's a part of my body, it's one of my organs, and I was really curious to see where it had gone to.

Speaker 5 So, when they reached out, and I was able to see that the little boy was really healthy, and that my kidney had started working for him, and that it had really changed his life.

Speaker 5 I was really delighted, and of course, I wrote back to them, and we talked back and forward, and then that's when the idea of meeting up came about. It was very emotional.

Speaker 5 I was crying, his mum was crying, and I think he was a little bit bewildered by all the emotion.

Speaker 5 emotion but it was just lovely to see him so happy and healthy and it was lovely to see how much of an impact and a difference it made for their life and for them.

Speaker 1 An emotional meeting as you say.

Speaker 1 How did it feel seeing a young boy whose life you have helped save?

Speaker 5 It was a little bit strange. Myself and my partner were both saying that it was strange to think that part of me is inside that little boy.

Speaker 5 He was just sitting playing with his toys and it was just strange to think that my kidney is inside him. But yeah, it was wonderful to see him just living a normal life.
And, you know,

Speaker 5 he doesn't appear any different from any other little, he's six now, any other six-year-old boy. He just loves dinosaurs and computer games.

Speaker 1 I mean, what an amazing advert for organ donation as well.

Speaker 5 Yeah, to be honest with you, it has had such a minimal impact on my life compared to the huge impact that it's had on his life and his family's life.

Speaker 5 Yes, there was a few weeks of downtime after the operation, but my life has gone back to normal completely.

Speaker 5 I have no limitations on my life whatsoever now, and he gets to live a normal life which he didn't have before.

Speaker 1 Do you think you'll stay in touch with the family and watch how he grows up?

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 5 You know, I plan to be there for every birthday going forward, and his family have actually invited me to a family wedding next year as well.

Speaker 5 So, yeah, it's been wonderful to connect with them, and it's great now to have that relationship with them going forward as well.

Speaker 4 developed a way to preserve donated organs for longer, which can dramatically increase the number of transplants. Claire Bois has been finding out more.

Speaker 13 This machine keeps the liver at a normal body temperature and it feeds it blood and nutrients.

Speaker 13 The company is called Organox, and I spoke to the CEO Craig Marshall and Dan Fower, the head of the laboratory. Craig, can you describe this machine for us?

Speaker 7 This machine essentially mimics our own bodies in many respects to keep it healthy and ready for that all-important life-saving transplant.

Speaker 13 Well here we go, press start.

Speaker 14 Obviously that organ has been stored at fridge temperature for some time now so it is going to take a little bit of time for it to warm back up and come back to life but you can see it's kind of filling with this nice

Speaker 14 it's actually moving moving ever so slightly as it takes on volume absolutely yes.

Speaker 14 So this is what our clinical teams experience every day using the machine, that kind of thrill of a liver coming back to life.

Speaker 13 Obviously, everything we're looking at is the result of years and years of research. Where did this begin, Craig?

Speaker 7 The founders of this company, they were compelled by the need to very much improve the way organs are preserved whilst they're outside the body. So what we're looking at here is the gift of time.

Speaker 7 So if an organ arrives at six o'clock at night and the team have been busy all day, they can now go home, rest, and then they can come back fresh the next day.

Speaker 7 And that's a game changer for a surgical team.

Speaker 7 So, the impact of this product is typically increasing the number of organs that are being transplanted at the centres that are deploying this as the standard of care something between 20 and 30 percent.

Speaker 7 So, 20 to 30 percent more transplants are happening thanks to this, or thanks to this product. Yeah,

Speaker 13 there are a few benefits. First, as we've just heard, the surgical teams have more time to prepare for an operation, knowing that the machine is keeping the organ going.

Speaker 13 And second, potentially more livers can be used because the machine has a screen which shows the surgeons just how well the organ is actually performing.

Speaker 13 David Nasralla is a liver transplant surgeon who took part in the first clinical trial back in 2013.

Speaker 15 Right now, the decision as to whether to accept or decline a liver for transplantation is not scientific.

Speaker 15 It's based on lots of very soft characteristics related to the donor's history, related to just how the liver looks and feels.

Speaker 15 And it's not uncommon for, on the basis of these very subjective characteristics, for surgeons to make the decision that they don't feel a liver is safe to transplant.

Speaker 15 So, what normathermic machine perfusion allows you to do is to put much more hard, objective numbers into that decision-making.

Speaker 13 So, it keeps it alive, we can measure it and it improves it too?

Speaker 15 It probably improves the liver.

Speaker 15 Okay, it's difficult to say definitively that it does, but what we see after the liver has been transplanted is that the way the recipients behave is as if they have received a better liver.

Speaker 13 David put me in touch with one of his patients Lisa Pengelli.

Speaker 13 Because the liver was put on this machine, it meant he could then monitor it and gauge how well it was performing and really be sure of it before he did the operation. And the operation went well.

Speaker 16 I remember waking up in intensive care just feeling very sleepy but really well. My husband commented on the colour of my eyes which were no longer jaundice.

Speaker 13 They didn't have that yellowy tinge.

Speaker 16 Yeah no yellowy tinge. I didn't look ill.

Speaker 13 So 100 machines are currently being used in Europe, North America and Australia. And the company is also developing a machine which can work on kidneys, too.

Speaker 4 Claire Bow's reporting, and you can hear more on people fixing the world wherever you get your BBC podcasts. We're going to take you to a village in the Swiss Alps now for our next story.

Speaker 4 Flimsaberg is 1300 meters up in the mountains, above the picturesque Wallansea Lake, close to the borders with Liechtenstein.

Speaker 4 It's home to a rather unusual race which takes place every year, the annual Cow Grand Prix. I've been finding out more.

Speaker 4 Nine female jockeys are saddled up and at the start line.

Speaker 3 And they're off.

Speaker 4 The cows and their riders hurtle past the crowds of excited onlookers. The cows are wearing bridles decorated with feathers and flowers.

Speaker 4 The latter are put on at the last minute as the cows love to eat them. 22-year-old Selena owns and trains Cobra the Cow.

Speaker 18 Riding a cow is completely different from riding a horse. It's far more unpredictable and you really have to hold on tight.
You can't steer a cow, that's the big difference.

Speaker 18 And it's not nearly as comfortable a seat, which makes it quite an effort. Cobra is eight years old and already a seasoned racer.
She trained beautifully, flying through the laps in practice.

Speaker 5 Now we're hoping she'll have a good run today.

Speaker 4 The race began over 20 years ago. The original idea was to put on an event for people coming to the cheese market.
A few of the farmers' wives suggested a cow race with actual riders.

Speaker 20 The men weren't keen on the idea saying it would be too difficult.

Speaker 4 That's Remo Ruf. He's the organizer of the Cow Grand Prix.

Speaker 20 So the women secretly trained their own. That's why to this day only women are allowed to ride.

Speaker 4 The race is now an annual highlight attracting around 5,000 visitors. It takes place before the snow comes.

Speaker 4 The local vets have given their blessing and the cows do two laps hoping to win the prize, a 40 kilo bag of feed, a traditional alpine cowbell and flowers.

Speaker 4 The cows look like they're having a good time.

Speaker 20 Every cow really takes part voluntarily. Beforehand, we select only the cows that generally seem willing to join in.
For them, it's fun.

Speaker 20 Sometimes during training they can actually run very fast, but on race day, some of them don't feel like it at all, and that's fine. If a cow doesn't want to run, she doesn't.

Speaker 20 She simply stops and stays where she is.

Speaker 4 Cobra sped up on the first lap, but slowed down on the second as last year's winner Viola charged through on the inside to take the crown once again.

Speaker 4 Her owner, Leah, raised her fist in celebration as she crossed the finish line.

Speaker 16 The most important thing isn't to win, but to take part.

Speaker 4 An unusual Grand Prix indeed.

Speaker 4 Coming up in this podcast.

Speaker 4 Music by one of the greatest ever composers performed for the first time in over 300 years.

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Speaker 4 Next to a Mexican-American journalist who's on a mission to make voices like hers heard, Emily Flores is the founder-editor of a media platform which is run by and for young disabled people.

Speaker 4 It's one of a few of its kind. She's been speaking to the Happy Pods Holly Gibbs about the platform and why she chose what some might see as a controversial name.

Speaker 11 It's all about putting young people at the center. And I think Cripple Media in particular is all about putting young disabled people in specific in the center.

Speaker 11 So Cripple Media is the first ever media platform that's run by and for young disabled people. So I grew up as a wheelchair user.
I'm a full-time wheelchair user.

Speaker 11 And I noticed that growing up there was a lot of unspoken misconceptions about

Speaker 11 disability. There is a disability writer that said it best.
It's almost like when you meet people, it's like they're kind of reading tea leaves about your future.

Speaker 11 Like, oh, it's so sad that, you know, you're going to have such a sad future. But there's really nothing sad about it.

Speaker 11 And I think that's part of the problem culturally is that disability is not seen as a cultural identity.

Speaker 11 And the reason why we named it Cripple Media was 90% of it was a straight-up value from our generation, which is that Gen Z is unafraid to kind of change narratives and confront hard realities.

Speaker 13 What would you say to the people who don't get it?

Speaker 11 I think it's okay to, you know, initially be maybe a little confused, maybe a little put off, but honestly what I would want to invite is curiosity.

Speaker 11 It's also totally normal to be scared or to be uncomfortable when meeting a disabled person for the first time.

Speaker 11 Because I think it's totally natural for somebody to you know be scared of something that they've never of something different.

Speaker 11 But I think what follows after that, it's important to foster curiosity, to kind of lead with questions rather than assumptions. Representation is so important.

Speaker 11 It changes the way that we think, it changes the way we treat each other.

Speaker 11 And I think when we see different types of bodies, different communities, different identities on TV, it really changes the way that we think of other people.

Speaker 23 Why journalism and what barriers did you overcome to get into the position that you're in?

Speaker 11 I actually came through journalism through One Direction.

Speaker 11 So it all started from the boy band One Direction.

Speaker 11 I was about like probably 11 years old and my hyper fixation was them. You know I loved reading and writing, that's all I knew.
I actually started a fan page. I had like 20k followers.

Speaker 11 Throughout that era I started to learn about like you know running and building a community like what that meant.

Speaker 11 So when I was like 14 I was like honestly that's all the experience I have but I want a job

Speaker 11 and I just started to look up maybe like writing jobs for young people or teens. I found one posting that they were looking for writers and I applied, I said that that was my experience and I got it.

Speaker 11 As far as for what barriers I overcame, I think it was really all about trying to get people to understand why disability was an important point of view and why it was, you know, something important to be said.

Speaker 11 You know, a lot of people also were struggling to understand

Speaker 11 what were the types of stories that I wanted to tell about disability.

Speaker 11 It wasn't that I wanted to say, it's so sad, and it's, you know, this story of like this family that has a disabled child, like, oh, look how cute. That's not the stories that I wanted to pitch.

Speaker 11 And so, really, trying to kind of, you know, make other people understand that and therefore also have that come through through my reporting and storytelling was something to be learned.

Speaker 2 This is the happy pod. Yes.

Speaker 13 What makes you happy?

Speaker 11 Young people and hope.

Speaker 23 Not one direction.

Speaker 22 Yes, but it's complicated.

Speaker 4 Emily Flores speaking to Holly Gibbs. Johann Sebastian Bach is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in musical history.
To many, he's the single greatest composer of all time.

Speaker 4 So imagine the excitement when two recently rediscovered works were confirmed as having been written by a young Bach at the start of the 18th century in Germany.

Speaker 4 Earlier this week, the two pieces for the organ were performed for the first time in more than 300 years at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where the composer is buried.

Speaker 4 Peter Wolney is the director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig and authenticated the works.

Speaker 24 I was very surprised to hear these pieces for the first time also.

Speaker 24 These are very early pieces. Bach wrote them when he was 17 or 18 years old.

Speaker 24 But still you could feel that there was a young musician who was trying to find his own personal voice in music.

Speaker 24 I saw the manuscripts actually in the summer of 1992 for the first time and somehow they attracted my attention so I ordered photocopies in the library in Brussels actually

Speaker 24 took them home and since then I have been trying to to find out more about the pieces about the manuscripts and it took more than 30 years before I was able to say these pieces were written down by Bach's first student in Arnstadt around 1705

Speaker 24 And when I was certain about this, I could also

Speaker 24 say

Speaker 24 the certain musical or formal anomalies in these pieces, that they are not mainstream, they are very special, and that these special elements must come from J.S. Bach.

Speaker 24 I think we understand better now that the young J.S.

Speaker 4 Bach

Speaker 24 was trying to accumulate as much musical knowledge as he could by studying the pieces of other composers.

Speaker 24 And at the same time, he was trying to use the elements that he saw in other composers' works to create his unique language.

Speaker 24 When we listen to the D minor toccata that you played first, we have this language right there. We know from the first note that this can only be J.S.
Bach.

Speaker 4 Peter Walney.

Speaker 4 To the far north of Scotland, next and the Shetlands, which recently hosted a group of men from America on a knitting trip.

Speaker 4 They were among thousands of people who flocked to the islands every year to learn about their knitting heritage. Andrea Rasikova has been speaking to some of the men who joined the trip.

Speaker 8 Quick knit reminders with Yarn Dragon.

Speaker 21 This is Pearl Through the Back Loop.

Speaker 8 Starting first with the yarn in our right hand, to Pearl Through the Back Loop.

Speaker 17 This is Jonathan Berner, a content creator from Seattle, better known as the Yarn Dragon. He says that knitting has introduced him to something spectacular.

Speaker 8 I was

Speaker 8 relatively newly sober. I was going to lots of 12-step meetings and painfully listening to the same guy tell his story for the 72nd time, you know, and

Speaker 8 thought that knitting would be a good way to occupy myself in those meetings. But man, I fell in love with the engineering and the history and certainly that fidget spinner aspect.

Speaker 8 I mean, it genuinely makes it easier to go through life having that thing to do with my hands. And it has made it so much easier for me to connect with the society.

Speaker 17 Jonathan joined 24 other men from different states in the U.S. on a journey to Shetland, more than 8,000 kilometers away from their home.

Speaker 17 It's a place renowned for its wool, knitting patterns and techniques, and somewhere the group described as the holy place for knitters.

Speaker 8 We talk about wool being part of a culture, but in Shetland, wool is the people. And the people are wool.
And the land is made for yarn.

Speaker 8 And the people have merged with this land in an incredibly beautiful way that man, it got into my blood.

Speaker 3 It's just an incredible place.

Speaker 17 The group were treated to a traditional fair aisle knitting class, learned about Cheon's history, and even visited local crofters to see how raw wool is turned into yarn.

Speaker 17 Friends Michael Wade and Chuck Wilmisher Jr., who organized the trip, had been inspired by smaller knitting retreats set up in the U.S.

Speaker 26 Men felt kind of separated and a bit tokenized or marginalized because they were the only guy in their knitting circle.

Speaker 26 And so the retreats were a great way for men from various kinds of walks of life to come together and talk about why they love knitting and why it's soothing and why it's creative and inspiring.

Speaker 27 Like Michael said, I used to be the token guy at my local yarn shop and just going to a retreat or on a trip with 25 other guys who love what you love

Speaker 27 and enjoy what you enjoy is just magical and then take it to somewhere like Shetland and it is just, it's just beyond.

Speaker 17 They both have noticed that more and more men are picking up fiber crafts, mainly during the coronavirus pandemic and thanks to video tutorials on social media.

Speaker 17 But Micah believes this popularity boom should go even further.

Speaker 26 I think more men should knit because it makes you slow down. It builds patience.
It makes you think about the world in different ways.

Speaker 26 And it makes you empathetic to the fact that knitting things is not easy. And it sort of makes you have appreciation for how difficult it is to create a garment.

Speaker 26 So I think the world would be better if more men knit.

Speaker 4 Michael Wade, ending that report by Andrea Rasikova.

Speaker 4 And that's all from the Happy Pod for now. If you have a story you think we should include or you'd like to comment on anything in this episode, we'd love to hear from you.

Speaker 4 As ever, the address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. And you can now watch some of our interviews on YouTube.
Just search for the Happy Pod.

Speaker 4 This edition was mixed by Rebecca Miller, and the producers were Holly Gibbs and Rachel Bulkley. The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Vanessa Heaney. Until next time, goodbye.

Speaker 3 Be our guest at Disney's enchanting musical, Beauty and the Beast. Fill your heart with joy and Disney magic.
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