For Marty and Laura Rosenbaum-Bloom, New Year’s Eve 2008 was definitely one to remember. While other couples were exchanging hurried kisses while the ball dropped, the couple of 16 ½ years were sharing a very real gift of life.
Marty had been battling idiopathic membranous glomerulonephritis, a rare kidney disease, for six years when his doctors told him in 2008 that the worst had come.
“One third of people with this disease go into spontaneous remission, a third stay the same, and a third go into end stage renal failure,” said Laura.
Marty was part of that unlucky third whose kidneys just give out under the strain.
“I was supposed to be put on dialysis,” Marty said. “They told me my kidney was operating at only 12 percent.”
Faced with a waiting list for a donor kidney that could span anywhere from two to seven years, Marty found his salvation in the same place he’d found so many years of loving companionship: his wife.
“I was aware that Marty and I were both O+, which is the most common blood type and a universal donor,” Laura said. “I was tested and my blood was cross matched with his. He had no antibodies toward my blood, so I was a match.”
In many ways, it was a match made in heaven. Just to be sure, though, Laura underwent several tests to ensure everything went smoothly.
“We were originally supposed to do the transplant on Dec. 10,” Marty said. “but Laura had to get another test. Finally, we were able to get it done on the 30th.”
And so after weeks of rigorous testing and agonizing waiting, they spent New Year’s Eve in the hospital at Atlanta’s Emory University, ushering in not just a new year, but a new life together.
“It was very romantic,” Marty added. It was just another chapter in a whirlwind romance that began at a Cincinnati theater house during intermission of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
“This theater had no air conditioning, and it was at least 100 degrees,” Marty recalled. “I went outside during intermission, as did everyone else, and it was just packed. Suddenly I see this face in the crowd.”
That face was Laura’s, and despite a rocky start that included both a slight age difference (“She broke the second date saying I was too old,” Marty quipped) and an unbridgeable divide in sports loyalties (she rooted for the Browns and the Indians, he backed the Bengals and the Reds, which is the Ohio equivalent of the Montagues and Capulets), the pair hit it off. They were married on May 30, 1992.
They moved to Hilton Head Island in November 2001, where Marty enjoys retirement and they both enjoy visits from Marty’s three children from a previous marriage and nine grandchildren.
Laura practices psychiatry on the island, while Marty works on his golf game and on regaining the active life he led before he was diagnosed, walking extensively with their dog Ollie. He continues to take anti-rejection medication, and will most likely take it for the rest of his life. Still, it’s a small price to pay for love.
These days, the couple never forgets the singular bond that ties them together, deeper than love and more complete than mere biological compatibility. They share a gift of life.
Or, as Laura’s tongue-in-cheek Valentine’s Day card to Marty this year said, “You have my heart. And my kidney.”
