Lifesaving organ donation after grade-school friends reunitedBY JOHN LAUINGER
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, February 17th 2008, 4:00 AM
They were best buddies and grade-school classmates growing up in Queens, but then life sent them in different directions.
Eleven years after the pals lost touch, Ricardo Manier, 21, of Fresh Meadows was in a Manhattan hospital with a rare kidney disease when an almost forgotten name floated into his Facebook network: Karl Celestin.
What happened next was no ordinary online reunion. Celestin ended up offering to donate his kidney to Manier - a selfless gift of life that will enable the old friends to become classmates once again.
"This is a blessing that doesn't happen every day," said Manier, who suffers from focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a potentially fatal kidney disease that has required him to be hospitalized countless times since age 5. "He's given me something not too many people would give."
Manier and Celestin were classmates at Holy Family School in Fresh Meadows until Manier moved to California in 1996, after eighth grade.
They will come together for the transplant surgery on Tuesday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell in Manhattan.
Manier, now living in New York with his mother, was a pre-med student at a California college until last June, when he spent six weeks in the hospital after his kidneys virtually shut down.
Doctors told him he had been just days away from death.
It was then, as Manier was beginning dialysis treatments in the hospital, that he reconnected with Celestin, a first-year medical student in the Dominican Republic.
The two were finally reunited when Celestin picked Manier up from a Brooklyn dialysis center.
They began hanging out again like old times, going to the movies, even double-dating.
Manier, always stoic about his condition, never asked Celestin if he would give him a kidney, even though he was facing a 10-year wait for an organ.
But Celestin said he made the decision because he couldn't bear to not help his friend, who had to put his dreams of going to medical school on hold for thrice-weekly dialysis.
"I put myself in his shoes," said Celestin, who turned out to be a perfect match for organ donation.
Manier said he was amazed when Celestin told him last September about his decision.
"It's given me a new lease on life," he said, noting that he is planning on joining Celestin at his medical school in the Dominican Republic in the fall.
"It's almost like I've been given a second chance," he added.
Manier says his lifesaving reunion with Celestin was a case of serendipity. His mother, Gail, thinks it was fate that they were grade school classmates.
"I feel he's had an angel watching over him," she said.
Celestin agrees. "Everything happens for a reason," he said.
jlauinger@nydailynews.com
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008/02/17/2008-02-17_lifesaving_organ_donation_after_gradesch-1.html
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