-- In the days before having cake for her husband's 49th birthday and a flight to Honolulu for the opening of training camp, Gina Zanik made her stand. Her husband, Justin, the general manager of the, had gone eight years without a physical exam and she vowed that he wouldn't go eight more hours without making an appointment with the team doctor.
Gina has spent the entirety of motherhood pursuing complex medical questions that have no answers, and yet her husband had been too stubborn to get some answers of his own. Now, this set something into motion that made him wildly uncomfortable: Asking for help, asking for attention. Through the winter, the solution emerged for Justin: Jeff Hart, the husband of Gina's childhood best friend, Chrissy, passed the screening process and became eligible to donate his kidney into the national registry. That allowed Justin to move up the list, find a match and get a date set for his transplant: April 2.
They stopped at McDonald's for milkshakes on the way home, just as the test results landed in Gina's phone. Another family meeting loomed in the kitchen. As it turned out, these were advanced forms of PKD, and will likely require Ava, Oskar and Lucy to undergo transplants before they turn 30 years old -- perhaps multiple times throughout their lives.