--- title: He Married His Kidney Donor. But Now, He Needs Another Kidney description: In 2013, Kyle Froelich married his kidney donor, Chelsea Froelich. Now he needs another kidney, and the couple is looking together. canonical: https://time.com/5562077/kidney-donor-married-couple/ author: Jamie Ducharme article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2019-04-02T20:03:05.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:52:52.471Z article:section: Health og:title: He Married His Kidney Donor. But Now, He Needs Another Kidney og:description: Kyle Froelich is in kidney failure again og:url: https://time.com/5562077/kidney-donor-married-couple/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7c2443575e1e108d/698947a109208fd89041394c/chelsea-kyle-wedding.jpg?branch=production&width=799&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 799 og:image:height: 449 og:image:alt: chelsea-kyle-wedding og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: He Married His Kidney Donor. But Now, He Needs Another Kidney twitter:description: Kyle Froelich is in kidney failure again twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7c2443575e1e108d/698947a109208fd89041394c/chelsea-kyle-wedding.jpg?branch=production&width=799&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # He Married His Kidney Donor. But Now, He Needs Another Kidney > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=ecfa0df1-68a0-4acb-99a5-f08c36951122&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Medicine is Trying to Solve a Shortage of Organ Donors [Watch (HLS stream): How Medicine is Trying to Solve a Shortage of Organ Donors](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/MTImRcut.m3u8) (3:21)  _Published 2017-10-25. Doctors at Penn are testing the use of hepatitis c-infected hearts for transplants._  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Apr 2, 2019 8:03 PM UTC  Kyle and Chelsea Froelich on their wedding day in 2013. Kyle and Chelsea Froelich on their wedding day in 2013. Courtesy of Kyle and Chelsea Froelich  by [Jamie Ducharme](https://time.com/author/jamie-ducharme/)  ## Jamie Ducharme Ducharme is a contributor to TIME. Apr 2, 2019 8:03 PM UTC Kyle Froelich’s first search for a donor kidney ended in a fairy tale romance. In 2010, Chelsea Clair decided to give her kidney to Froelich—a man she’d never met—after hearing through a mutual friend that both of his were failing. The pair began seeing each other every day as Clair went through the donor testing process and eventually started dating after the transplant was complete. Kyle’s health returned, and they got married three years later, making [headlines](http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/10/25/man-who-received-kidney-transplant-marries-his-organ-donor/) across the country. Now, however, the Indiana couple is back in the news for a less celebratory reason: the kidney Chelsea donated is failing. If Kyle doesn’t get a new one within the next year, he says, he’ll be forced to go on dialysis. “We’ve done it before. You have to stay optimistic,” Kyle, 28, says of his second search. “I don’t ever worry about it. I just have faith that it’s going to happen. When it happens, it happens.” The first time around, it happened thanks to Chelsea. At age 12, Kyle was diagnosed with a condition that causes an antibody to collect in his kidneys, resulting in inflammation that makes it difficult for his organs to filter waste products from his blood. By 19, Kyle was in desperate need of a transplant. He began looking for a donor among family and friends, but his type O blood made it difficult to find the right match. Dozens of his loved ones were tested, but none was the right fit. “I’d had so many people tell me that they wanted to do it,” he says, “and it was for a long time a letdown, because nobody was ever a match.” Then along came Chelsea, who heard about Kyle when a mutual family friend asked her to hand out flyers for a fundraiser on his behalf. The more she learned, the more she wanted to help. “My dad needed a bone marrow transplant back in 2006 \[but\] he passed away before it could happen,” says Chelsea, who is now 31\. “When I learned about Kyle, it was kind of like our situation. I just had this feeling that maybe I could be the one that helped.” Today, the Froelichs are parents to a six-year-old son, as well as Chelsea’s 12-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. “When somebody saves your life, you want them in your life forever,” Kyle says. But nearly 10 years later, they’ve found themselves right back where they started: searching for a kidney for Kyle, after a bout of pneumonia weakened his immune system and allowed his underlying condition to worsen, pushing him toward kidney failure and leaving him to battle through near-constant fatigue, nausea and weakness. “It’s definitely different than the first time, when he was younger and didn’t have any children or responsibilities like that. It’s scary,” Chelsea says. “But I’m hopeful.” Dr. Tim Taber, Kyle’s nephrologist at Indiana University Health (IUH), says it’s not uncommon for kidney recipients to need a second, or even third, transplant. But Kyle’s kidney failure happened “a little sooner than we expected for him,” Taber says. Taber says they’ll start by looking for a donor match for Kyle, though that may be difficult, since Kyle already knows that most of his loved ones are not matches. The couple is relying on flyers and word-of-mouth awareness, as well as a February _Today_ show appearance that they say resulted in hundreds of messages from people who said they wanted to get tested. “Getting his story out there certainly raises the chances that he’s going to find a donor,” Taber says. But if he doesn’t, IUH may resort to paired donation, in which patients with willing but unsuitable donors are paired up with other patients in that position, in hopes that their potential donors are matches for each other. Kyle is also on the national organ waiting list. But with more than 100,000 Americans in need of kidneys, [according to the National Kidney Foundation](https://www.kidney.org/news/newsroom/factsheets/Organ-Donation-and-Transplantation-Stats), Taber says the wait time for one in Indiana is between three and six years — time that Kyle doesn’t have. With few other options, the Froelichs are doing everything they can to find a kidney on their own. “You’re never done looking until you’re on the table for surgery,” Kyle says. “There are so many things that can go wrong and change. That’s why it was such a big deal when Chelsea was a match the first time.” The kidney transplant was “not what our relationship was founded on or built on, but we would have never met each other if that hadn’t happened,” he says. “It’s kind of sad and surreal that at some point in the future, that’s going to come to an end.” _If you’re interested in donating a kidney to Kyle, learn more and contact Indiana University Health_ [_here_](https://iuhealth.org/find-medical-services/living-kidney-donation)_. If you’re interested in organ donation in general, learn more_ [_through the United Network for Sharing Organs_](https://unos.org/transplant/living-donation/)_._ ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] You're looking into a tunnel that's just dark. You don't know what's going to be at the other end. There certainly was no light. There's no light until the night that they came and told me that I was going to be transplanted. That's when it all changed. Tom had been waiting for a heart transplant for a while And he was otherwise relatively healthy. And so we thought that he would be and ideal first candidate. And I seen Dr. Maclean many times in clinic. when I was hospitalize waiting on the regular list for the heart. She came in and explained this new program, the USHER Program. [ MUSIC ] Many of the patients on the wait list actually die on the wait list. Therefore, it's in everyone's best interest to find a way to increase the pool of donors that we have. 500 to 1, 000 donors they're hard to [ UNKNOWN ] because they have a history of hepatitis C. The drugs that are now used for hepatitis C, upwards of 95 % of the patients who receive these drugs, Are cured. These are the pills that I take in the morning when I get up. It's enough to choke a horse but I do it. I've read a lot about hepsy, what the symptoms would be if you had it and it wasn't anything to be fearful of. I just figured to go for it and it wasn't until the third day out of surgery That the hepatitis C showed up in my blood stream. They started me on the new drug, which is called Zepatier, and by the end of that week, there was no trace. [ MUSIC ] We've certainly come a long way since 1967 when the first transplant was done in South Africa. Time. And one of the perils of the first heart transplant was that we weren't able to control the immune system well enough. So those patients tended to succumb from either rejection or from infection. So over the past few decades we've gotten so much better at using our immunosuppression drugs in order to make sure that our patients don't reject. Where we are vastly limited is in that donor pool, where we haven't had more and more donors, which is why this study is so important. All right, come on let's get your picture taken, come on. I'm hoping that some time in the future we'll have better therapies for heart failure so that people won't need transplants. But in the meantime while they do, if it turns out that the study goes really well, that patients are doing well, that we follow them along, For years and may do just as well as other people. It will be amazing. It would revolutionize heart transplant. [ MUSIC ] ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5562077/kidney-donor-married-couple/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5562077/kidney-donor-married-couple/"},"headline":"He Married His Kidney Donor. 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