A story worth hearing
Over 500 transplants: a Utah record
Intermountain Medical Center celebrates a milestone that, behind the numbers, is hundreds of lives.
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What it’s about
Intermountain Medical Center celebrated more than 500 organ transplants in 2025, a Utah record. Patients, families, and medical teams gathered to celebrate the lives that were saved. The number is impressive, but what really weighs is what’s behind it: each of those 500 is a person who got their future back.
What you take with you
- 500 transplants in a year sounds like a statistic. But it’s 500 families who got someone back, and 500 people who got their lives back.
- Milestones don’t happen on their own: behind them are donors, surgical teams, and a system that, even if imperfect, works when people choose to donate.
- Celebrating a record is also a way of telling the person who’s waiting: it happens, it comes.
Why I’m sharing this
Because when you’ve spent months or years on the waitlist, numbers can crush you instead of help you. This news flips them around: 500 transplants are 500 proofs that the system works. If you’re waiting, this is hope with data. If you’re thinking about donating, this is what your decision makes possible.
A personal note
What this video leaves me with
During dialysis, numbers scared me: wait times, percentages, lists. But the day they told me "you have a kidney," all those numbers stopped mattering. Mine was one of those 500. When I see news like this, I don’t see a statistic: I see 500 people like me, each with their own story of waiting and of arrival. If you’re waiting, this number is for you too.