A Kerrville nurse asked a routine pre-op question. The answer changed both their lives.

Dana Edson was doing routine pre-operative questioning for a surgery patient in Kerrville — standard intake, standard questions. She asked whether the patient had both kidneys and whether they worked well.

The patient said no. She had donated her left kidney to her son 16 years earlier. And now her son needed another one.

Edson’s response came out before she had time to think about it.

“I said, ‘Well, I’ll test.'”

When the host asked if the decision was spur-of-the-moment, Edson — a Kerrville night-shift nurse — did not hesitate.

“Absolutely. Because anything that comes out of my mouth that quick is usually sarcastic. Or given. So I decided it was God-given.”

She prayed about it. She talked to her husband. And she said yes.

What followed was, at the time, the largest organ swap in Texas — a six-way exchange involving six donors and six recipients across three Houston hospitals. Because Edson did not personally know her intended recipient, she entered the general donor pool. Her entry triggered a domino effect: chains of matches formed, releasing pairs that had previously been stuck because they didn’t match each other. Edson’s kidney went to a woman named Rudine. They are, in Edson’s words, kidney sisters.

Four years after the laparoscopic procedure, she is perfectly healthy.

“I am still living fat and happy and I don’t feel a difference from it,” she said Thursday on Lead Live’s Nonprofit Week. “You don’t have to know a person to be a match for a person. It never hurts to go to a transplant center and just test and put your information out there.”

Edson appeared alongside Kristy Vandenberg, executive director of the Ultimate Gift of Life Foundation, which is celebrating its 13th year of organ and tissue donation advocacy. Vandenberg spent 37 years with the Red Cross before dedicating herself to this cause and now travels to between 40 and 50 events per year — 5Ks, color runs, gun shows — to register donors and debunk the myths that prevent people from signing up.

The myths are persistent. Three came up in Thursday’s conversation.

The first: that ER doctors will not fight to save the life of a registered donor. False, Edson said. “We first do no harm. Just know that.”

The second: that organ donors cannot have open-casket funerals. Also false. “That’s a myth,” Vandenberg said.

The third: that certain churches prohibit organ donation. Vandenberg encountered 15 to 20 people at a single festival in Poteet who believed their priest had told them their faith forbade it. The Catholic Church, she clarified, officially views organ donation as a life-preserving, charitable act. The prohibition, when it appears, reflects a local clergy member’s personal position — not church doctrine.

Vandenberg also addressed the age question directly.

“We’re not too old. We’re not too young. We’re not too fat. We’re not too skinny,” she said. “Let the doctors decide at the time of our demise to see what can and cannot be utilized. Take what you like and burn the rest.”

Even the skin of older individuals, she noted, is highly pliable and deeply valued for treating burn victims.

One piece of information that Edson said she wished she had known before donating: living organ donors go near the top of the transplant list if they ever need a transplant themselves.

“I found that out the day after I donated,” she said.

Vandenberg’s primary focus is high school outreach — she has recently presented at Harper, Johnson City, and Tivy — reaching students who are getting their driver’s licenses and have never thought about the checkbox on the form. She estimates at least 50% arrive with no understanding of how organ donation works, often carrying their parents’ misconceptions.

“I want to get to them and talk to them about organ donation so they can go home, talk to their parents,” she said. “That’s a win-win. We’re getting to two groups of people.”

The foundation’s story carries a local name. Mary Krebs’ son Jacob died. His organs went to others.

“He has now helped over a hundred people,” Vandenberg said. “She takes a lot of comfort as a mom in knowing that he’s out there. He’s still out there helping other people.”

The foundation hosts one fundraiser annually: Trees of Hope, held the weekend before Thanksgiving at Grape Juice, where owner Derek provides the space in exchange for cookies. Hundreds of custom-decorated trees raise roughly half the foundation’s annual operating budget. Popular themes include Longhorn, Texas Tech, Dallas Cowboys, Houston Texans, Mardi Gras — and one custom hippo tree for a local collector.

“Don’t take your organs to heaven. The Lord knows we need them here.” To register as a donor or contact the foundation: ultimategiftoflife.org.