“I'm not sure why I get so emotional because I've done this two thousand times, but in this case it kind of touches your heart,” organ transplant surgeon Dr. Linda Chen says crying.
Bittersweet is Shawn Glenn’s new kidney. Yes, he can now live a much longer life, but the donor was his deceased 13-year-old daughter, Symaria.
“I feel guilty. I feel like it's not okay to be happy. I try to look at it from a positive standpoint … because people at the hospital say, ‘congratulations, you got a kidney.’ But the cost …” Shawn says through tears to Inside Edition, trailing off the end of the sentence.
Symaria loved performing, especially monologues, She had a knack for the stage and wanted to be an actress. One day, the West Palm Beach teenager came home from school complaining of a headache. It wasn’t normal, said her mother.
“She was not just very attentive about theater, acting and drama, but her studies. She was always on top of them. So, telling her to go lay down when she said she had a headache was a big thing for her, because she had homework, and homework has to be done,” her mom, Dhima Martin, tells Inside Edition Digital.
At some point, Symaria became unconscious and was taken to the hospital. She died of a brain bleed.
Dhima quickly made the decision that Symaria would donate her organs. An honor walk, that celebrates organ donation, was held at Joe DiMaggio’s Children Hospital in Hollywood, Florida.
Six organs went to five people. Often the donor’s family doesn’t know who the recipients are. In this case, Dhima knew Symaria’s kidney would go to her father, who had been on dialysis for a few years. He never told any of his five children he was sick.
“Without [Shawn] though, she wouldn't be here in the first place. So, he was a part of her living, and now she's a part of him and gets to be a part of him forever,” Dhima says of the choice.
“It wasn't even an idea in my head. I can't even say where I was mentally. But she pushed it,” Shawn says, looking at Shima.
Less than 24 hours after Symaria died, Shawn was in surgery at Memorial Healthcare System, also in Hollywood, Florida.
Dr. Linda Chen performed the organ transfer.
“I'm not sure why I get so emotional because I've done this two thousand times, but in this case it kind of touches your heart,” she says, crying. ‘We talk about it as being a beacon of hope and his great hope, right? Because it's a living memorial essentially of him and his receiving his child's kidney.”
More than 100,000 people are waiting for kidneys in the U.S. Every eight minutes, another person is added to this national transplant waiting list. In 2022 alone, 5,600 people lost their lives while waiting for an organ transplant.
“It's really important to have donors,” stresses Chen. “We can have living donors and that would be usually a family or a friend, someone who's going to give you an anatomical gift, but otherwise a lion's share of people wait on the network of organ sharing wait lists for many, many years and depending on where you live.”
Shawn says doctors told him that “if Symaria wouldn't have gave me a kidney, my body would've rejected 99.9% of any kidney I ever got.”
Which leads Shawn to wonder: Did this tragedy happen for a reason?
“I'm still on the fence about it, but it's an idea,” he says.
And in some ways, it’s helping both parents heal.
“Even despite all the odds, I believed for a miracle. So, sharing her story is that miracle, her life in itself is that miracle. I believe that our life is planned or written before we're even here on this earth,” Dhima says.
For Symaria’s funeral, a special Playbill was created in tribute to the rising star. The headline read “A Celebration of Life for Symaria” Dhima says its been a struggle to do these interviews about their sudden loss. But they do it for her in her memory.
“Never would've imagined this was our story … because we wanted more time.”
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