When I heard this story it sounded like a fairytale.Once upon a time in Bermuda there lived two women with the same name. Lynn Marie Henry was active, upbeat and full of energy.Lynne Marie DaPonte was upbeat but she didn’t have the energy to be as active as Ms Henry so Ms Henry gave Ms DaPonte one of her kidneys. This saved her life, and both are now planning weddings and expect to live happily ever after.Fairytale-ish as it sounds, the story is true (although the weddings take place later this year, so the ‘happily ever afters’ haven’t actually started yet).Low blood pressure coupled with Type One diabetes was the reason Ms DaPonte tended to lack energy.The two women both worked in the health care industry. Ms Henry was (and still is) a registered nurse and Ms DaPonte was (and still is) a clinical dietician. They met at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital when they both worked on the same ward.Ms Henry was 12 years older. Although she didn’t hang out with most her work colleagues she formed what she called “an unlikely friendship” with her younger namesake.“She was single and younger and didn’t have any kids,” Ms Henry said. “We were not likely friends, but we became really good friends.”As years passed they moved on to different jobs. Ms Henry became Bermuda Hospitals Board’s clinical risk manager and Ms DaPonte went into private practice as a clinical dietician.“She’s not my best friend, but we did keep in touch and I would see her a few times a year,” said Ms Henry.Agreed Ms DaPonte: “We are not best friends but we are good friends and we have a lot of history in terms of friends and family.”Ms Henry one day noticed that Ms DaPonte had lost lots of weight and didn’t look well.“As a nurse I could see that she was declining from a kidney point of view, because I am very familiar with dialysis patients in my nursing experience,” said Ms Henry.In 2004 Ms DaPonte’s doctors had told her that her kidney function was declining. In 2009 they told her she should expect that she would need a kidney transplant within two years.Being a food and nutrition expert she maintained a proper diet, but because kidney disease is incurable, she could only stave off the inevitable.“Your kidneys are filters and once they start to break down there’s no reversing it. You can only prolong it,” she said.Ms DaPonte’s mother came to her aid and offered to donate one of her kidneys. Initial testing showed her mother was a good match and Ms DaPonte’s mind was put at ease. But in the final rounds of testing, her mother’s results were not as strong as doctors wanted and they feared her losing a kidney would compromise her own health. They refused to do the transplant operation.Ms DaPonte recalled that she then had worrying feelings: “I [worried that] no-one is going to want to give up an organ for me. [I worried that I was] going to have to be on dialysis and a kidney transplant list for the next five or six years.”She also worried that if she did not get a kidney within five or six years that she faced a life where she was permanently on dialysis.When Ms Henry learned of this setback in her friend’s situation it hit her hard. She felt strongly that she wanted to help.“When I found out her mother couldn’t do it, it upset me so much because I was so hopeful for her. Being younger than me, being never married, never had children, wonderful girl, bright, smart, got everything going for her but her health; that just was not something that sat well with me,” she said.Knowing Ms DaPonte’s blood type was O positive and that her own blood type was the same, she thought there was a chance one of her kidneys could work in her friend.“I thought about it and when I decided that’s what I wanted to do I talked to my mother and fiancé about it,” she said.She was a 51-year-old mother-of-two. Her children were very concerned about her decision but her mother and fiancé fully supported her choice.Ms DaPonte was touched, but shocked.“I was really taken aback. She was very gung-ho. She was the one who organised all the tests and I said, ‘Alright I’m catching up with you’.“It was awesome to have a friend feel that way about me, that wanted me to be that well.”Despite that she feared her friend would change her mind.“That’s always in the back of the mind of anyone getting a kidney from a live donor,” she said. “But I had come to the point where I realised that although my mother could not donate to me, that two people were willing to help me out. And that if two were willing, then a third would come along. I just had to be patient.“It would have been disappointing if someone had backed out, but at the same time, in my frame of mind I knew it was something you could never hold against a person.“Just for them to offer in the beginning made them a special person in your eyes. The fact that they cannot give it to you in the end, you have to realise that okay, they were not strong enough mentally to be able to do that.”Both Ms Henry and Ms DaPonte had extensive psychological counselling beforehand to prepare them for the surgery and life after. Organ donations are conducted so that the donor has the opportunity to opt out at any point before the organ is taken.“I could have said ‘no, sorry’ when I was on the operating table, and backed out. No pressure would have been placed on me and no questions asked,” said Ms Henry.But last December 7 Ms Henry expressed no reservations to surgeons and donated one of her kidneys to her friend.“I am here today because of what she did,” said Ms DaPonte.Although that is true, counsellors warned the women that such feelings need to be kept in check.“The coordinators worry about you feeling obligated to your donor for the rest of your life,” said Ms DaPonte. “[There is concern] that you [might] feel that you owe every single thing and your every breath to your donor.”As a recipient Ms DaPonte said she couldn’t help having these feelings. She stressed that Ms Henry has never pressured her or made her feel guilty about the donation.“She always told me, ‘I’m doing this out of the goodness of my heart and the fact that I care about you as a friend’,” said Ms DaPonte.Nevertheless the counselling did include advice on not making demands of the recipient.“They do go over with the donor that they cannot extort the recipient,” said Ms DaPonte. “What’s done is done.”And in this story all has ended happily.“My mind has been at ease since the surgery and even more so now because every time I go for blood tests everything is fine,” Ms DaPonte said.“When I get a shower and see the scars on my chest from the dialysis catheters I think: ‘Thank God I don’t have to do that anymore!”Ms DaPonte and Ms Henry are both getting married this year. Ms Henry will marry Andre Labonte in June, and Ms DaPonte will marry Paul DeSilva in October.