A three-time Pro Bowl selection with the Green Bay Packers and the 1971 NFL Rookie of the Year, John Brockington was accustomed to living with some pain, accustomed to having a body that delivered. It never occurred to him that this kind of health might have an expiration date on it. So in the spring of 2000, 23 years after he retired from the league, and 23 years since his last physical exam, John ignored a growing list of symptoms: urinating too frequently, urge to urinate but unable to do so, sweating, fatigue and swelling.

By June, it was harder to climb stairs, harder to keep a meal down and harder to pretend his body was just going to snap out of it. A friend from church finally persuaded him to see a doctor. John’s doctor ordered a number of blood tests. The results were unbelievable. In fact, the doctor sent them back to the lab to be rerun. Then he called John with distressing news. “You are in extreme renal failure with potassium levels so high you could have a heart attack at any minute. Get to the ER.” “It starts cascading and it gets progressively worse and you can die,” John explains. “When they finally diagnosed me, they said I was close. I had renal failure, needed an immediate transfusion and spent days in the hospital. The creatinine (toxin level) in my body was 44.4, and it should be about 1.5 to 1.6. They told me there was no biological reason I should be alive. ‘We’ve never seen anyone with numbers like this on this side of the grave. We could write a paper on your condition.’” After several days in the hospital with his long time friend Diane Scott by his side, his creatinine levels were finally reduced. John had plenty of time to think. In the months that followed, he paid attention to his health, followed the advice of Dr. George Fadda, his nephrologist, and fought to stay off of dialysis.

September 11, 2001 came to him as it did to many others, trapping him and Diane for days on a road trip to Green Bay and Columbus, Ohio, where he was going to be inducted into the Buckeye Hall of Fame. With the NCAA game cancelled, his creatinine crept up, along with the nausea and anemia that went with it. John made it home a week later with a creatinine level of 30, and was immediately put on dialysis. Meanwhile, the hunt for a matching living donor was underway. With no family members available, John’s Ohio State teammates put out the call, and the Sharp Memorial Transplant Center in San Diego was flooded with inquiries. But his friend Diane was also at work, trying to persuade the doctors that even with the disparity of size, race and gender, she should be the first candidate.

Finally, with all the tests in, the final hurdle— size—was overcome when a sonogram revealed oversized kidneys in her 5’1” frame. For Diane, the decision was a simple one. She had the opportunity to undergo a medical procedure that could save someone’s life. Said Diane, “I think all of us have a list of people we would do that for. John was certainly on mine.” The former Green Bay Packers’ running back received a life-changing kidney transplant from his future wife, Diane Scott, on November 28, 2001, but his fight for organ donation awareness didn’t end that day. When ESPN picked up their story and ran it repeatedly on the TV show “Outside the Lines” over Christmas of 2003, their desire to share this inspiring message with a larger audience became reality.

“It doesn’t make any sense to take these organs to the grave,” John argues. “As former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson said, ‘If on your death bed your eyes could vote, wouldn’t they want to keep on seeing? Your heart to keep on beating?’ God wants your soul, not your body.” Diane is even more blunt. “Organ donation works. It saves lives.” Since 2002, The John Brockington Foundation has sought to raise awareness about organ donation, and to help those in San Diego on dialysis through the Patient Emergency Fund. The work of the foundation has taken the Brockingtons many places, from the Appleton Wisconsin Blood Center to The Hard Rock Café in Times Square with the rap music group Run DMC, and in front of audiences who have seen the ESPN piece and want to hear their story in person.

It’s a love story, but it’s also a story of friendship and perseverance and of the medical miracle called transplantation. No matter what the audience, the message is the same: save lives and spare your family the decision by registering your wishes in your state’s organ donor registry. “There’s no reason for me to sit here after I got my second chance and not fight to give that to others,” says John. “I know this is going to be the mission we share for the rest of our lives.”

Please learn more about the Brockington’s work by visiting the John Brockington Foundation Web site atwww.johnbrockingtonfoundation. There are over 92,000 Americans who are on the national waiting list, hoping for a lifesaving transplant. Go towww.DonateLife.net and register your commitment to solve one of the few fixable problems in America today.

This article originally appeared in the November 2006 edition of aakpRENALIFE.