Shardae Orr spent three years being told she had nothing more than a urinary tract infection, even as migraines left her blacking out and blood showed up in her urine. By the time doctors finally ordered the right test in 2019, she had stage 4 renal failure and polycystic kidney disease, and she was told her options had narrowed to dialysis or death.
Orr was 28 in 2016 when she first noticed blood in her urine along with other discomforts, according to CBS News Atlanta. She was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection at that initial visit, and when she returned with continued symptoms, doctors again diagnosed her with another UTI. Over the following years she also experienced severe migraines that caused blackouts, very high blood pressure and extreme fatigue, all while making repeated doctor visits from 2016 through 2019, she said.
It wasn't until 2019 that Orr asked for a renal panel herself, a test that finally revealed the extent of the damage. She has a family history of kidney disease, and she has said that history was documented but overlooked for years, leading to what she describes as a misdiagnosis. Rather than wait passively for answers, Orr said she and her husband chose to travel and live life fully together while also planning for the possibility that she might not survive.
A Rare Match Emerges From the Family
Faced with the reality that dialysis or death were her only paths forward without a transplant, Orr said she did not want to spend her life tethered to dialysis. Family members and friends stepped up for donor testing, but none of them turned out to be matches. Her husband, Emmett Orr, decided to get tested after those other candidates were ruled out, and he turned out to be a match for his wife.
Finding that kind of compatibility outside a paired donation program is unusual. According to the National Kidney Registry, the odds of two biologically unrelated people being a perfect kidney match are estimated at roughly 1 in 100,000, since tissue typing checks six key markers known as Human Leukocyte Antigens to gauge compatibility. Emmett Orr said the transplant gave his wife a second chance at life, and he said it also gave the couple a second chance to start a family. He has also said the experience raised questions in his mind about whether more spouses would consider donating organs to one another.
Since the transplant, Shardae Orr has appeared less tired and fatigued, and she has started gaining more weight, according to the same report from CBS News Atlanta. The medical data backs up why a living spousal donor made such a difference: living donor kidneys reached a one-year graft survival rate of about 98% in 2024, compared with 94% for kidneys from deceased donors, per the U.S. Renal Data System. Research from the United Network for Organ Sharing Renal Transplant Registry has also found that living spousal donor transplants maintain 3-year graft survival rates of 85%, performing comparably to transplants from living parents despite the lack of a genetic relationship, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Why Doctors Missed It for So Long
Dr. Sharad Vermani, a nephrologist with Georgia Nephrology and Emory Healthcare, said continued symptoms following a UTI diagnosis should prompt additional testing rather than a repeat diagnosis. He said family history should be factored into any medical diagnosis, and he noted that patients in the African American community are often underdiagnosed and not treated in time. Vermani also pointed to genetic predispositions as a contributing factor to kidney disease disparities in that community.
Chronic kidney disease can go undiagnosed for years because symptoms often do not appear until the disease has progressed, Vermani said. That warning lines up with national data: a CDC chronic kidney disease report updated in March said roughly 87% of American adults living with the condition do not know they have it, since early-stage damage produces few visible symptoms, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC estimates that 37 million U.S. adults, or 14%, have chronic kidney disease overall. Vermani recommended a urine albumin-creatinine ratio screening for patients with risk factors, and he said insurance will likely cover extra screenings when those risk factors are present.
Orr's condition, autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, is the most common genetic form of kidney disease, affecting an estimated 1 in 400 to 1,000 people worldwide, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. It carries a 50% chance of being passed from an affected parent to each child, and it causes fluid-filled cysts to gradually expand the kidneys, with about half of patients progressing to kidney failure by age 60.
Georgia's Waitlist and a Push for Living Donors
Orr's case landed inside a broader shortage playing out across Georgia. More than 3,000 residents in the state are currently on the kidney transplant waiting list, with Black and Latino individuals making up approximately 65% of those candidates, according to LifeLink Georgia data reported by FOX 5 Atlanta. That same reporting noted that only 36% of state residents are registered organ donors, which compounds already long wait times. Nationally, the average wait for a deceased donor kidney runs three to five years at most transplant centers, according to the American Kidney Fund, a delay that pushes many patients toward living donors to avoid prolonged dialysis and its cardiovascular toll.
Those disparities have deep roots in policy as well as biology. In December 2022, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network board mandated the elimination of race-inclusive eGFR calculations, a change that took effect in January 2023 and required transplant centers to backdate waiting times for Black kidney candidates disadvantaged by the old formulas, which had previously overestimated kidney function in Black patients and delayed nephrology referrals. Black Americans make up about 13.5% of the U.S. population but represent over 35% of the country's dialysis patients, making them more than three times as likely as white Americans to develop kidney failure, according to the National Kidney Foundation, which attributes the gap largely to higher rates of hypertension and diabetes alongside structural barriers to early care.
The National Kidney Foundation will host its annual walk in Atlanta next month, and the 2026 Atlanta Kidney Walk is scheduled for September 12 at The Battery Atlanta, featuring a two-mile walk beginning at 9:30 a.m. to raise funds for research, early diagnosis and patient support programs. Orr's story joins a small but growing list of spousal kidney donations making news this year, including a Phoenix firefighter's donation to her husband reported earlier this month.
