up her diploma at graduation.

Betty was on dialysis for seven years after the first transplant failed. The time proved tumultuous. Her parents split up, her older siblings moved out. She took up smoking.

Dialysis technology kept improving, but the treatments wore her down. She tired more off the machine than on. She had seizures from a low blood-cell count and risked hepatitis from multiple transfusions.

Without a working kidney, she stopped growing. Unable to eat dairy products, potatoes and most fruits, she grew weaker and thinner. At her height, she should have weighed 110 pounds. Instead, she weighed less than 80.

After high school, Betty's dialysis schedule appealed to her even less. Instead of three hours each weekday, it was five hours three days a week. More times than she'd liketo recall, she showed up at the dialysis center in high heels and drunk after an all-night binge.

"Wake me up when I'm done," she'd tell nurse Schrantz.

Out of the blue, on May 23, 1981, Hahnemann's transplant coordinator called to offer a kidney from an unidentified person who died. "You have a half hour to decide," the nurse said.

Fed up with dialysis, Betty opted for a second transplant.

She was weeks away from her 23rd birthday, older and more emotionally prepared. However, kidney No. 2 failed like the first -- before she could leave the hospital.

This time, Betty knew what was happening. Riding with an orderly in an elevator to her room after a test, she felt the same sharp, stabbing pain in her abdomen that she experienced the first