Grocery customer donates kidney to favorite cashier

After learning Myra de la Vega was on dialysis, Dan Coyne offered her a kidney. On Friday, they underwent surgery
By Julie Deardorff, Tribune reporter
A month ago, Dan Coyne knew just two things about a cheerful cashier who worked at Jewel-Osco in Evanston: her first name and her need for a new kidney.

On Friday, however, their lives became inextricably linked after Coyne donated one of his healthy kidneys to Myra de la Vega, of Evanston, a Filipino immigrant and single mother of two teenagers. The daylong organ transplantation took place at Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Kovlar Organ Transplantation Center, which performs about 170 living-donor transplants a year and is one of the busiest programs in the country. Read More…