Family and friends of Brian Minns are raising money for the nonprofit Help Hope Live to fund uninsured medical expenses associated with transplantation.

July 13, 2024

The day we have been waiting 2 long years for has finally arrived...

We got the news today that Brian's kidney transplant will be September 3rd, 2024!!!! Eternally grateful doesn't even begin to accurately describe how we feel. Heidi Morgan has been undergoing bloodwork and various testing for over a year now to selflessly donate her kidney to Dad. Thanking God, she is an acceptable match!

Life is funny... Heidi and Brian share the same grandchildren: Lennon, Sawyer, and Emery (who happen to be my amazing kids)! This unique connection has brought them together and made this donation a possibility.

If you have been following Brian's story for any amount of time I humbly ask you two things:

Please keep praying. Pray for Brian, Heidi, their respective medical teams, and their families. Pray for peace of mind, health, and good news. This has been a journey for all involved and prayers are powerful!

Please continue sharing our donation page and consider donating if you have not already. This money will go towards any donation related expenses like travel, accommodations, co-pays, medicines, etc.

We are in the homestretch! Heidi will travel to Boston from South Dakota for the last round of bloodwork 2 weeks before surgery. Please pray for safe travels and optimistic test results!

Thank you for your continues prayers and love up until this point. It means more to all of us than you'll ever know.

Join our Facebook group for more regular updates!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/216339304251720/

March 4, 2023

Friends and Family - near & far,

In August of 2022, following months and month of various, debilitating symptoms - and after fighting off a respiratory virus (not Covid-19 related) - my father, Brian, was diagnosed with Stage 5 Chronic Kidney Disease. His kidneys had virtually no function, and this story would have been very very different had we waited even days to get to the hospital...

Since then, he had been travelling to the dialysis clinic on Cape Cod three times a week for hemodialysis. His nurses say he's had some of the worst luck responding to his treatment and it's very hard on his system. When introduced to the idea of switching to Peritoneal Dialysis that could be done on his own at home, we were very interested. It's much easier on his body, although he does have to do it every single day, the pros outweigh the cons for us. He has been doing his own treatment at home for the past few weeks.

This past week, Dad sustained an injury that resulted in a hernia. Due to the way peritoneal dialysis works, he can't do his at home treatment with a hernia. Unfortunately, he will have to have surgery to repair his injury and go back to hemodialysis for 6-8 weeks while he recovers.

He will now have to travel twice as far to a different clinic where his Nephrologist found him a chair, three times a week, from 6-10 AM. While we are of course so grateful and thankful for the miracle that hemodialysis is in nature, it completely wipes out his entire day and makes it unable for him to work. He is swiftly going through all his sick pay, which he was fortunate enough to have a good amount of.

Dad will continue to be treated with hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis until it's his turn to be blessed beyond words with a kidney donation. He is officially on the transplant list with Mass General Hospital in Boston. The average wait time on the deceased donor list is 6-8 years.

There is no easy way to ask for something like an organ donation, but another option for my father is a living donor. With a willing, living donor match he could have a new kidney in less than a year. If you find it on your heart that you may be willing to make the ultimate donation of life for my father, you can use the link below to fill out an application to see if you are possibly a match. It costs $0 to donate an organ to a loved one (or even a stranger). There's no earthly way we would be able to repay such a gift, but we will certainly try for the rest of our lives.

https://www.mghlivingdonors.org

If you have made it this far it's likely that you know my Dad and you understand just how deeply loved he is by all that know him. He has such a large community of support around him through his family and his endless list of friends from all walks of life. Any amount of a donation, or any amount of times this link is shared, helps us more than you know. My Dad is the type of person who helps everyone else around him as often and as best as he can. His generosity knows no bounds. He is an incredible friend, a loving father, brother, son, uncle, cousin - and an even more amazing 'Bampy' to his 7 grandchildren. We want to keep him around for as long as we possibly can. Prayers, donations, and shares across social media and with your own friends and family are welcomed with open hearts.

On behalf of my dad and the rest of the family, thank you for considering, and we will keep you updated as time goes on.

All my love,

Erin