‘This is my forever family’: Facebook post leads to life-saving kidney match – KWTX

KILLEEN, Texas (KWTX) – The alarm was set before sunrise, just like every other dialysis day. At 3:53 in the morning on October 14, Shyreka Wallace routinely scrolled Facebook before her appointment. Then she saw it — a post that would change everything. “She posted on Facebook looking for someone who needed a new organ,” Wallace recalls. For 25 years, Wallace has lived with lupus, a disease that causes her body to attack itself. The Killeen woman knows pain intimately — the kind that can make walking nearly impossible and cause weight fluctuations from steroids. It’s the constant sickness that comes with fighting an invisible enemy. “It’s painful at times. Sometimes you can hardly walk. You stay sick a lot. Your weight goes up and down because of the steroids you’re on,” she said. This wasn’t Wallace’s first dance with organ failure. In 2005, her kidneys gave out. She waited five grueling years for a match, five years of watching her health decline while hoping for a miracle that seemed increasingly unlikely. When that kidney finally came, it gave her nearly two decades of renewed life. But last summer, the familiar signs returned. “I started having trouble breathing. I started
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