Stacy Hobson suffered from chronic kidney disease and high blood pressure and had been on the transplant list for 18 months. Her doctors told her the wait for a deceased donor kidney would run five to seven years, and that she should start dialysis.
She said no. She wanted to keep traveling.
“I’m like, if I can’t do the things that I love, it’s not living for me,” Hobson told Action News 5.
In May 2025, Hobson said she was in Greece when she suddenly felt at peace with whatever happened.
That same month, about an hour and a half away in Memphis, Jenny Joyner started the testing process to give a kidney to someone she’d never met.
Joyner has three kids: a high school senior, a middle child with Down syndrome, and a 10-year-old, as well as a job as an admissions counselor at Ole Miss. She hadn’t been planning any of this, but then a friend posted something on Facebook about living kidney donation, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“Facebook and God, to be honest,” she said, when asked how it started. “I could do that.”
Then, she says, her husband set a drink down at dinner that night in a plastic cup with a transplant organization’s logo on it, one she didn’t recognize.
“I didn’t even know we had the cup,” Joyner said. “It was like just another God piece into the story.”
She spent weeks in compatibility testing at the Methodist Transplant Institute. Shortly after Hobson got home from Greece, her phone rang.
“I literally screamed,” Hobson said.
The surgery was in August 2025. Hospital privacy rules meant the two women still didn’t know each other’s names, so Hobson wrote a letter to the person who’d given her a kidney and sent it through the hospital.
“I just thanked her from the bottom of my heart because I just feel there’s no amount of words that I could say to thank her enough,” Hobson said.
Joyner read it while recovering at home, not knowing who had written it.
The two met in early November, both fully recovered. Joyner says she’d do it again.
More than 100,000 people are on the national transplant waiting list, and about 85 percent of them need a kidney.
