Throughout her life, Betsy Crais' family and friends have accused her of having "rose-colored corneas," a charge that captures her way of filtering out the world to see only the bright side of things.

LIFELINE   Friends and colleagues Betsy Crais (left) and Linda Watson both returned to work on April 5 following their March 9 kidney surgeries. Crais, professor in Allied Health Sciences, was the recipient, and Watson, clinical associate professor in Allied Health Sciences, served as her donor.

So what if she had been born with a disease that one day would leave her with two bum kidneys? As a young woman, Crais assured herself that somehow the kidneys would hold up long enough to get her through old age.

As she approached her 53rd birthday last October and it became apparent her kidneys were shot and would not get her through another year, Crais' optimism remained unbowed.

Her husband could donate his kidney and all would be fine, she thought.

When tests came back showing that he could not be a donor, a close friend at work stepped forward.

Organ donor awareness day to be held April 14 "Life Takes Guts" will be held in the Pit on April 14 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sponsored by APPLES Service-Learning Program and underwritten by the Kenan-Flagler Business School and Carolina Donor Services, the event will promote organ and tissue donation awareness in the University community. In addition to the information presented, groups will be performing during the day, and there will be a series of door-prize drawings for merchandise and gift certificates to local businesses. For more information on "Life Takes Guts," refer to intranet.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/events/organdonor/index.html.

Weeks later, when her friend's tests came back negative, it was the friend who was the most distraught. Crais sent her flowers to tell her it really was all right, that it really is the thought that counts. And she still believed a donor would be found.

Crais kept telling herself that even after her kidneys were removed last November and even after she began the arduous process of dialysis.

Now that Crais has returned to work after a successful kidney transplant operation on March 9, it has become clear even to worry- warts that rose-colored corneas sometimes can have 20-20 vision.

A community responds
The "Gazette" first did a story about the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences professor and her need for a kidney donor on Nov. 5, or what would be 13 days before her kidneys were removed.

In response to that story, four people came forward to say they would be interested in being tested, Crais said.

Two were University employees who were strangers to Crais.

Two others were people Crais knew from her job as an Allied Health Sciences professor.

One was the mother of a girl whom Crais had seen as a speech clinician who also happened to work at UNC Hospitals. The other was a young woman who had been a student of Crais' and who still lives in the area.

Even before these four came forward, a man named Andros from Tennessee whom Crais barely knew told her he would be happy to give her one of his kidneys. Andros and his wife run a catering business in the resort town of Monteagle where Crais vacations each year with her husband, son and daughter.

Andros, after hearing Crais talk of her kidney problems, had marched over to the table and said, "`I will give you my kidney. I don't have children and you have these wonderful children and have everything to live for.'"

Crais thanked him, but she remembers feeling uneasy about the idea of somebody who knew her so little doing something for her so big. And she remembers trying to talk him out of it.

And there was Cindy Thomas, her cousin from Chicago who called her Oct. 28 on her birthday. She said, "I have the best birthday present you could ever imagine." Then she said, "Well, how about a kidney?"

And then, on a Friday night three days before an operation to remove her kidneys, the phone rang and she heard the voice of her friend Linda Watson on the other end.

A fateful decision
Crais first met Watson in 1988 after she decided to complete a master's degree in speech and hearing sciences. Crais ended up as one of Watson's teachers and felt intimidated by her, a woman about her same age with a doctorate in education. Watson was so unassuming in class that Crais quickly forgot about Watson's advanced degree -- until Watson turned in a written assignment. They were always superior to those turned in by the other students, Crais said.

Watson completed her degree in December of 1989 and by the fall of 1990 she and Crais became colleagues in the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences where Watson now works as an associate professor.

Because they worked together and talked to each other almost every day, a phone call from Watson at home struck Crais as unusual. The reason for the call did not click in her head until Watson finally blurted out, "Lynn McCoy told me I had to call you."

Crais knew McCoy was transplant coordinator for UNC Hospitals.

"There was silence on my part and silence on her part and then Linda said, `I've been going through donor testing. So far, everything is going great and I've been passing all the tests.'"

Watson said she made the decision to try to become a donor in late October, almost as soon as tests came back showing their co-worker, Laurie Cochenour, could not be a donor, just as Cochenour had done after tests showed that Crais' husband Mike could not be a donor.

Watson said the only reason she had kept her tests a secret for as long as she did was because she did not want to see Crais disappointed again should tests reveal she could not be a donor.

But there was a problem.

McCoy knew about the handful of other people who had come forward as a possible donor for Crais. Further, McCoy knew that Crais could not understand why none of them had begun testing. (Testing protocol calls for only one potential donor to be tested at a time.)

Crais needed to know why, McCoy told Watson, and Watson needed to be the one to explain it. McCoy could not tell Crais without violating patient confidentiality.

Watson said talking to Crais proved far easier than convincing her own husband that giving a kidney was something she should be thinking about doing.

Her husband Joel is an engineer, Watson said, trained to base hard decisions on hard facts instead of soft emotion. For several weeks, the two of them went around and around on the issue.

People take risks every day, often without thinking about them, and often for no substantial reason, she told him. She gets in her car every day in her commute from Raleigh to Chapel Hill and has been doing so five days a week for some 23 years.

Somebody at the hospital had explained to her that the risk of giving one of her kidneys was the statistical equivalent of adding 20 miles to that 40-mile trek.

To help a good friend, taking this risk seemed altogether acceptable.

"Despite the fact that Joel is an engineer and normally operates on the basis of data, his position was that the data on the low risks did not help ease his anxieties about me being a kidney donor," Watson said. "He understood the data, but it didn't speak to his emotions."

For Watson, what mattered was that in the end Joel told her he would support her no matter what she did. And he carried through on that pledge by taking off work for most of two weeks to be there for her before and after the operation.

Post-op optimism
Five days after Watson's phone call, Crais woke up in the recovery room brimming with more confidence than even she could have imagined.

Watson was in the middle of testing, and there were five other people who could be tested if necessary, starting with her cousin.

Crais suffered from polycystic kidney disease, or PKD. PKD is a degenerative condition that causes cysts to develop and fill with fluid inside the kidneys. A normal kidney should be the size of a fist. Crais' kidneys, when they were removed, were the size of small footballs.

"The very first thing I did was I put both my hands on my belly to see if it was smaller, and it was smaller, and I said, `This is great.'"

No longer would she look like a starving, pregnant, middle-aged woman.

Over the course of the past year, she had dropped to about 100 pounds from her normal weight of 125.

With the swollen kidneys no longer compressing her stomach, Crais quickly began to regain weight and recoup strength as she fell into the time-numbing routine of dialysis. Both tasks were made easier by friends at work, who after her surgery, established "Betsy's Meals on Wheels." For a full month, the operation faithfully had home-cooked dinners waiting for Crais after she returned home from dialysis after 7 p.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They also established a "Driving Ms. Betsy" list of people who would take her and pick her up from dialysis.

Meanwhile, Watson continued with testing that was proving to take far longer than usual.

"It just seemed like every time they had a test, there would be a lack of clarity in the results," Watson said, which prompted the need for another test, and another one after that.

October dragged into November, and then it was December, and Christmas, and still there were ambiguous results needing further review.

Finally, on Dec. 30, doctors cleared Watson to be a donor after an angiogram showed the blood supply to both her kidneys was normal. Watson shared the news with Crais in that first week of January when Crais returned to work. Crais said she will never forget it.

"She came into my office and closed the door and said, `I've got great news,'" Crais said. "`I've passed all the tests. It's confirmed.'"

Crais remembers hugging Watson through a blur of tears. "I can't believe it," Crais said. "It's been such a long wait."

'Let's get past this'
In deference to Watson's teaching schedule, Crais suggested that the operation be put off until the end of the semester, but Watson told her, "Oh no, I want to get this over with as quickly as I can."

With that, the operation was set for March 9.

Both women remember feeling anxious, but in different ways.

Crais was anxious because she couldn't wait for it to happen.

"I knew I was going to feel better," she said. "I knew I was going to get off of dialysis. It was kind of like, `Let's move on to the next phase of my life. Let's get past this.'"

For Watson, the anxiety flashed through her like a bolt of lightning a few days before the surgery.

"I was really surprised at how calm I was until I went away to a conference in Tampa on the Thursday before the Tuesday surgery," Watson said. "Flying back that Sunday, I felt butterflies in my stomach when I started thinking about it."

The thought hit her that the only thing left on her calendar before the operation was a staff meeting to select Ph.D. candidates for admission -- a meeting she knew Crais would also attend.

Co-workers quickly turned the meeting into a sendoff for both of them. Watson arrived at the meeting with two identical stone bracelets. She put one on and gave the other to Crais.

A woman from Watson's church had made them for good luck, Watson explained. Four of the stones were for good kidney health, four others for good post-operative healing, four more were for general good health. Jackson Roush, the director of the Division of Speech and Hearing Services, took a picture of the two of them together.

The next morning, the two women saw each other one last time before the surgery and both were wearing the bracelets.

Later that day, Crais laughed through the pain when a nurse came into her hospital room and told her that there was another woman on the unit she had seen that day with a bracelet exactly like the one Crais was wearing. Crais told her, "That's my donor."

Both women are doing well and returned to work on April 5.

In the days after the operation, whenever the two women spoke to each other, Crais found herself struggling over and over again to put into words all the emotion churning inside her. Almost involuntarily, Crais found herself repeating a variation of the phrase: "How can I ever be able to thank you enough?"

The answer came in the form of a card that Watson sent her. On the front of the card was a picture of a beautiful swan in flight. Below the swan were the words, "All that the human experience is about is the journey toward wholeness."

Inside the card Watson wrote, "You have said, `You will never be able to thank me.' But I think the experience has been equally powerful in a positive way for me. Hopefully, my kidney will contribute to your physical well being for years to come. Taking this step to give it contributes to me in a more spiritual journey toward wholeness."

Watson's soothing words healed Crais in a way no one else could have done. And it felt, Crais said, as if Watson had given her one last priceless gift.