When the call came from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Brianne Algerio missed it.

Cellphone trouble meant the initial good news, which she’d been waiting for since 2019, went straight to her voicemail. As she scrambled to call the hospital back, CHOP staff called again and informed her that a kidney had been found for her 12-year-old son, Jake Algerio. Her joy was tempered with skepticism.

“I was actually thinking, are they sure?” she said about the call on May 1. “We had been to CHOP two months before because they had a kidney for Jake, but it didn’t work out. He didn’t get the surgery.”

Algerio, a certified medical assistant at The Wright Center for Community Health Hawley in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, didn’t begin to feel hope until CHOP staff wheeled Jake into the operating room on a gurney.

Jake’s medical challenges began before he was born. One of his kidneys measures only half a centimeter and the other just one centimeter – far smaller than the average of nearly nine and a half centimeters for a child his age. Since birth, he has endured countless hospitalizations, surgeries, and infections. For the past nine years, he has relied on nightly peritoneal dialysis, which uses a catheter to filter toxins through the lining of his abdominal wall.

In September 2019, Jake underwent a kidney transplant at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania. Complications led to the removal of the new kidney shortly thereafter, and Jake celebrated his sixth birthday in a hospital bed. Since then, Algerio and her husband, Don Sweeley Jr., have worked to find a living donor for Jake.

Nearly 104,000 people across the United States need an organ transplant, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a private, nonprofit organization that manages the nation’s organ transplant system under contract with the federal government. Of those, more than 96,000 need a kidney, according to UNOS. Most patients wait between three to five years for a kidney donor.

Jake’s new kidney came from a deceased donor, about a year after his name was re-added to the UNOS waiting list. Incredibly, the kidney he received was a near-perfect match for Jake, CHOP staff told Algerio.

“The hospital staff were all celebrating,” Algerio said.

Before she could join in, however, her son had to endure the eight-hour transplant surgery. She described the agonizing wait alone at CHOP that day, receiving texts from her husband and her mother asking for updates that she didn’t have. After the surgery was complete, she briefly visited Jake in his hospital room to reassure him. He was groggy and disoriented from surgery, she said.

Mom and son spent about two weeks at CHOP after Jake’s surgery. After they returned home to Honesdale, they visited the hospital weekly for about two months. These days, they make the trip every other week to ensure Jake is recovering as scheduled.

“We’ll eventually start going monthly until about November or December, just to make sure Jake’s body doesn’t reject the transplant,” Algerio said. “I won’t really relax until it’s been a year since the surgery. It still feels like it’s just the first hurdle for him.”

Four months after the surgery, though, there’s no denying how much healthier he looks and feels. Algerio smiled as she watched Jake, sporting bright red Sketchers sneakers, race around with his younger sisters – 7-year-old Zoey and 5-year-old Emma – at Honedale Central Park on a sunny afternoon in September. His older brother Ryan, 18, was waiting at home.

“Jake couldn’t play like this in April,” Algerio said. “He’d get tired so easily. He was like a little old man, hunched over and out of breath.”

In addition to being more energetic, Jake has gained a little weight and grown a few inches taller. He also celebrated a fun milestone this summer – a visit to Honesdale Borough Pool on Aug. 9. Pre-transplant, he had to avoid public pools because the chlorine could have damaged the catheter inserted into his stomach or caused an infection.

“He was hesitant to swim at first, but I told him, ‘Just jump in,’” Algerio said. “He did, and he had a ball playing with his friend.”

Pausing from his playground games, Jake said he’s feeling better since he received his new kidney. He hiked up his shirt to show off his stomach scars – a little pucker where his catheter once was and some healing surgical incisions from the transplant procedure.

Post-transplant, Jake is looking forward to going on vacation because his dialysis machine has made it difficult for him to travel. After he came home from CHOP in mid-May, his family returned his dialysis machine to the hospital and discarded all the dialysis equipment that was a part of his nightly routine for most of his life.

“Maybe to Florida to visit my grandpa,” he said about where he’d like to go. “That would be fun.”