69-Year-Old Woman Waits a Full Year for a Liver Transplant, Then Gives it Away

 

There are few situations that make a person feel more desperate or helpless than being placed on an organ donation list.

And as ABC affiliate WFAA in Texas reports, 69-year-old great-grandmother Brenda Jones knows that feeling all too well.

In desperate need of a liver transplant, Brenda spent a full year on the donation waiting for her name to move to the top and hoping that a donation would come through in time.

But when it finally did, there was a pretty big catch. When doctors called to inform her that she was at the top of the list and there was a liver available, they also told her they had an emergency patient, a 23-year-old woman who wasn’t on the list, but would die within a day if she didn’t receive a liver transplant immediately.

They asked Brenda the impossible question: would she give up the liver she’d been waiting a year for, and give it to the young woman?

For most of us the decision would be gut wrenching. For Brenda, it was a no brainer.

“In my heart, I wouldn’t have been able to live with the liver if I had let this little girl die,” she said.

Check out the video below to see the full story.

 

She Failed the Bar Exam 10 Times But Never Gave Up. This Is What Happened When She Finally Passed.

 

The philosopher Bertrand Russel said, “No great achievement is possible without persistent work.”

Historian Thomas Carlyle put it similarly when he said, “Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.”

And California’s Evelyn Uba, who put herself through law school while raising four children and finally passed the bar exam after 10 failed attempts said, “I cannot give up, because you believed in me. You believed in me, and I did it for you… WHOOOOOO!”

 

 

As Good Morning America reports, Evelyn emigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria in the early 1980s with the dream of becoming a lawyer.

But when her father died shortly after she arrived in the States, her plans changed. She put off her dreams of going to college for years, and focused on raising her four children.

While this certainly delayed her dream, she was determined to make sure it didn’t get derailed completely.

“After my last child turned 2, I went to a school that I could afford that was conducive to being a mom, going to work, and making payments,” she told GMA.

Getting into law school was one thing, but passing the bar and officially being certified as a lawyer was another. Evelyn found it difficult to balance the rigorous study required with her duties at home, and failed the test time after time after time.

But she never gave up.

“I took the exam more than ten times,” she told GMA. “I stopped counting after a while but giving up certainly wasn’t in my dictionary.”

Perseverance was. As was persistence, determination, success and – as her daughter’s tweet below so beautifully reveals – celebration.

 

This Mom of 3 Has Helped More Than 400 Seniors Schedule Vaccine Appointments

 

When COVID-19 vaccines finally became available and an end to the pandemic seemed at long last to be in sight, many of us were elated—until it came time to actually find a vaccine appointment.

The vaccine rollout has been scattered and confusing across much of North America, making many people feel lost, confused and frustrated as they try to navigate the various portals, bookings and eligibility requirements of their local regions.

It’s been particularly frustrating for seniors, who are at higher risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms, and often less digitally savvy than some of their younger counterparts.

It’s into this gap between immediate need and digital prowess that Marla Zwinggi has inserted herself.

As Reader’s Digest reports, the 40-year-old mother of three has been spending up to ten hours a day online since February, helping people secure vaccine appointments that they couldn’t find themselves.

“Young man, that’s the nicest thing anybody has done for me since my husband died.”

 

“TL;DR: Got married, in a never ending good mood, helped an elderly lady who lost her husband, her gratitude has me thinking about the love they must have shared for years.”

 

From new adventures you never thought you’d take to late-night texts you never thought you’d send, love can make you do some crazy things.

Fortunately, it can also make you do some great things, as redditor u/dcisco51 recently discovered.

“I got married last Friday. Just at the court house, thanks Covid, so no honeymoon(yet),” he recently shared on r/feel good. “But ever since I’ve been in the best mood.”

And he was still in a heightened state of marital bliss a few days later, when he drove to the pharmacy in the pouring rain to run some errands.

“As my friend and I got out of the car I noticed an elderly lady unloading her cart into her car. She had it sitting under the awning of the store and was making trips while leaving the door open. Her car was getting soaked.”

Still beaming from their recent nuptials and feeling particularly warm toward their fellow human beings u/dcisco51 offered to carry the rest of the woman’s groceries for her.

 

 

Why You Don’t Need Social Media (And How to Stop Using It)

As pretty much everyone who’s ever tried to do a digital detox learns: weening yourself off social media is tough.

After all, social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok aren’t just backed by billions of marketing dollars that help make them ubiquitous.

They’re also designed by software engineers to maximize the number of dopamine hits you receive while using them, making refreshing your Facebook feed almost as addictive as pouring quarters into a casino’s slot machine (and about as productive).

Fortunately, while breaking your social media habit may not be easy, it’s certainly not impossible.

And there’s at least one person who’s managed to take his digital detox to a whole new level.

Cal Newport is a professor a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the author of multiple books, including Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Digital Minimalism and A World Without Email.

And as he explained on an episode of The School of Greatness podcast, the key to finally breaking social media’s spell lies in recognizing what you do – and crucially, don’t – need.

This Man Lost 150 Pounds in Lockdown & How He Did It is Inspiring

More than a year into the pandemic, many of us are languishing – we’re exhausted, lethargic, and feeling guilty for spending so much time doom scrolling through social media and streaming apps.

Kyle White, on the other hand, has never felt better.

As Canada’s CBC reported last week, White has lost 150 pounds since going into lockdown about a year ago, completely overhauling his habits, health and lifestyle in the process.

“A little over a year ago, I stepped on the scale and I was around 430 pounds,” White told the CBC. It was at that point that he vowed to make a change.

He started small by committing to walking his dog each day, extending the walks a little further each week, and eventually getting into hiking.

But the biggest change has been to his diet, which he says is now “about 98 per cent free of animal products.”

“It takes a lot of hard work, but the conditions that we had the past year kind of gave us the time, which was, maybe, a hidden benefit in the mess that was 2020,” he told the CBC.

Check out the video above to learn more about how White lost “a whole person” worth of wait.

7 Productivity Lessons From the Ancient Stoics That Will Help You Get More Done

 

Anyone who spends their days in front of a computer (which is to say at least one billion of us) knows how it feels to sit down at their desk in the morning and feel like they’re absolutely swamped, overwhelmingly busy and constantly being pulled in a million directions.

And yet, at the end of the day, it often feels like despite all that busy-ness, you didn’t actually get anything done.

In a modern world in which we’re constantly bombarded by emails, instant messages, Zoom meetings and other electronic distractions, it might seem hard to believe that some of the best lessons for being more productive come from a small handful of men who didn’t live long enough to see the invention of pants.

Stoicism is a philosophy founded by the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno and later spread to the Roman empire, which focused on how to reach what the Greeks called eudaimonia, or happiness.

Though the philosophy is multifaceted, fundamentally it’s based on the idea that happiness lies in accepting our present reality as it is, and focusing on virtue rather than external things or material possessions.

In the video above, bestselling author Ryan Holliday, who explored stoicism in his books The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy, explains how, even though they lived thousands of years before the invention of the internet, the stoics actually had an approach to productivity that can be incredibly helpful today.

Human Happiness Isn’t What You Think It Is, According to Two Psychologists

Whether you subscribe to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “Money often costs too much,” or prefer Notorious B.I.G.’s more succinct summation – “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” – most of us understand that, despite our urgings, material wealth isn’t the answer to our problems.

But… why??

After all, nearly all the things that really do make us happy and fulfilled – a loving family, a rewarding career, a higher purpose, etc. – are made easier with money.

So why is it that winning the lottery can often be the single worse thing that ever happens to a person, while coming down with a terrible disease can sometimes be considered “a gift”?

In an episode of her podcast The Happiness Lab, Yale psychology professor Dr Laurie Santos speaks with Harvard’s Dr. Dan Gilbert to find out why human happiness isn’t exactly what you’d expect.

 

Better Leader, Better Parent? Absolutely, These Authors Say

 

Though the pandemic has definitely blurred the line between work and home for millions of people, many of us still believe in maintaining a healthy work/life balance.

And while that can mean something different for everyone – no email after 6pm, for instance, or no work until the kids are in bed – one thing that seems pretty obvious is to not treat your family like you treat your employees.

Unless… maybe we should?

“People know what good leadership looks like: it’s clarifying your values, it’s having conversations with stakeholders about what’s important, it’s having a vision,” says Alyssa Westring, co-author of Parents Who Lead. “All of that stuff makes a good parent, and there’s no reason to leave it in the workplace.”

Westring and her co-author Stewart Friedman argue that many of us spend a lot of time thinking about how to be a good leader at work, and not enough time thinking about how to be good leaders of our family.

But as they recently explained to the Harvard Business Review, the good news is that the two types of leadership actually involve many of the same strategies:

 

Chinese-American TEDx Speaker Demolishes Racial Bias “I am not your Asian stereotype”

 

In the wake of recent violence against Asian Americans, the world has a renewed – and long overdue – interest in not only protecting racialized individuals, but examining the way we view and treat them.

But while the pandemic has brought the issue into a stark light, the truth is that Asian Americans have faced forms of bias, racism and discrimination for years—and it doesn’t take a gunman to make their safety and sense of self feel threatened.

“As a child, I quickly began to realize that I had two options in front of me,” explains TEDx speaker Canwen Xu, who immigrated to America from China at the age of two. “Conform to the stereotype that was expected of me, or conform to the whiteness that surrounded me. There was no in between.”

Five years before a gunman killed six Asian women (and two other people) in a shooting rampage in Atlanta, Xu gave an emotional and revealing TEDx talk that revealed the struggles she faced as a Chinese immigrant to the United States, and the inspiring way she learned to embrace her background’s disparate parts.