Shawn Glenn never told his 13-year-old daughter, Symaria, that he was dying. He refused to explain to any of his children that he was going to kidney dialysis appointments three times a week.
He didn’t want them to worry, or worse, to research his condition themselves — and perhaps see the average life expectancy of five to 10 years, then decide to donate one of their kidneys to him.
“It was a sacrifice,” Glenn said at a news conference Tuesday in the transplant wing of Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood. “Because they see you not working most of the time, I’m not gonna lie, I felt like a bum. I felt like that, but I would prefer them to think I was a bum than to know that I was dying.”
Symaria died about two months ago from a brain bleed. On Tuesday, Glenn wore a T-shirt with her name on it and two bracelets on his wrist: one she had made him for Christmas and another that the hospital gave him. Its letters read, “Hero Dad Match.”
“Tell us about your kidney donor,” said Yanet Obarrio Sanchez, Memorial Healthcare System’s senior director of corporate communications.
“That was my 13-year-old princess,” Glenn replied.
Symaria had died suddenly at the end of January. One moment, the spunky teenager was performing monologues at Bak Middle School of the Arts in West Palm Beach and playing a video game, Grand Theft Auto, at her father’s house because her mother didn’t approve.
The next moment, Symaria was telling her mother, Dhima Martin of Wellington, that she had a headache after volleyball practice. Her condition quickly deteriorated. When her mother went to check on her, she was unconscious. Paramedics later airlifted her from a local hospital in Palm Beach County to Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, next to Memorial Regional.
For a few days, Martin believed her daughter could still survive. Her room in the pediatric intensive care unit was her favorite color, purple, said Brittany Guttierez, the ICU’s nurse manager. Pictures of Symaria and Bible verses covered her hospital room and the operating room.
Her parents, both religious, kept saying “but God,” as a sort of mantra, Guttierez recalled: “But God, how,” and “but God, why.”
“Up until the operating room, I had hope,” Martin said Tuesday, adding that she told Guttierez and the surgical team, “if she wakes up on that table, y’all stop.”
But Symaria was soon pronounced brain dead.
It was Martin’s idea first, Glenn said, to see if he and Symaria were a match for a kidney donation. He was originally diagnosed with kidney failure in 2019 and didn’t get on the national kidney transplant list until 2020. With a wait list of more than 90,000 people, most Americans wait three to five years for a donation.
Symaria ended up donating six organs and has saved five lives including her father’s, according to the hospital. Another recipient was a young girl.
“In making that decision, her body was that — just a body,” Martin explained Tuesday, seated next to Glenn on the couch in the same T-shirt, wiping away tears. “You know, she had went on to heaven at that point, so why not? Why not save somebody else’s child? Somebody else’s life?”
Doctors had to run tests to see if Glenn and his daughter were compatible, said Dr. Edson Franco, the surgical director of the Memorial Regional Pancreas Transplant Program. The chances of compatibility are about 50 percent between parents and children, according to the National Kidney Foundation. But the specific circumstances surrounding Symaria’s donation are very rare, Franco said.
Knowing that Symaria loved to make her parents bracelets, when the hospital staff got the call that she and her father were a match, they gave him the bracelet to share the news.
Glenn was able to have the surgery through Memorial’s Transplant Institute, the only center in Broward County that offers kidney transplants to children as well as adults, and to attend his daughter’s funeral. He returned to the hospital the following Monday.
Dr. Linda Chen, the surgical director of the Living Donor & Pediatric Abdominal Transplant Program, described Symaria’s kidney as a “bittersweet gift.”
“She’s continuing her journey through her dad,” Chen said.
Despite the good that has come out of the tragedy, Martin still struggles with the same question, “but God, why?”
“Accepting it is a lifelong journey,” she said. “But I know it in my heart. He allowed me to be her mother and I’m honored, blessed to be her mother. But she’s God’s child first, so she gets to save lives. She gets to save her dad’s life, and she gets to be home with him.”
Two months later, with Symaria’s kidney inside of him, Glenn still hasn’t fully processed losing her. He tries to keep busy so he doesn’t have to be alone.
But “physically, I’m great,” he said. It’s still a battle to try to keep his levels right, and he often returns for doctor’s appointments if something is off. But he didn’t seem worried.
“I know this kidney won’t fail,” Glenn said. “I know it won’t.”
This article was updated to reflect that Memorial Regional Hospital’s Transplant Institute is the only center in Broward County that offers kidney transplants to both pediatric and adult patients.