There's no way to be sure, but Roy F. Jensen thinks it's him.

"It made me feel like I knew him, like I've known him for years," said Jensen, 54, sitting in his American Fork office two decades after the transplant. "I don't know how it was fair that I got to benefit from his death."

Jensen will never know for sure the identity of the man who, through a tragedy of his own, gave him the chance to watch his kids grow up. All he has is a guess. But that has never discounted the gratitude he feels for the gift.

"I still get a little choked up about it," he said, tears cumulating at the corners of his eyes.

Bountiful donors

Utah is one of the best states in the country for people in situations like Jensen's, said Intermountain Donor Services Educational Director Alex McDonald.

"We have over 65 percent of the population signed up to be organ donors," he said. "We're actually leading the nation in that."

Though not every organ is usable, Utahns have been impressively generous with their willingness to donate, McDonald said.

"At the time of death, when people are really making a decision, typically, 90 percent of people have said yes," he said. "To have nine out of 10 people saying yes at the time of donation is amazing."

In the past five years, living donations have outpaced deceased ones in Utah. Of the 160 kidney transplants that took place last year, 92 used organs from a live donor.

That's good news -- especially since the organ waiting list is currently 330 strong, with 160 of those patients needing kidneys, McDonald said.

"I think that says a lot about people, that they are willing to step forward," he said.

Signs of trouble

Jensen was flying home in 1987 from a business trip to California when the nausea first hit. Sitting at the back of the airplane, he felt the quiet stirrings of the flu-like sickness that would rack his body for months.

"I just started to feel rotten," he said.

When the nausea and fatigue persisted, his wife urged him to visit a doctor. There, he was told that his blood pressure was off the chart. Three weeks later, somebody from the University Hospital in Salt Lake City called to tell him he needed a new kidney.

"It was total shock," he said. "I had not had any health problems my entire life. I was working out at the gym, I was swimming, I was running. I was in excellent physical shape."

Jensen needed a second opinion to be sure. He got no better news. So then came the first step of treatment: blood transfusions.

"They did that to get my body used to having somewhat of a foreign substance," he said.

Two of his sisters volunteered to be donors, but doctors said neither could. One had a history of health problems, and the other simply wasn't a match. So Jensen was put on a waiting list. As the weeks and months wore on, he started dialysis at the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo three times a week.

"It was hell. It really was," he said. "They hook you up and you sit there and you're sick. Literally, your blood is being pulled out and put through a machine to filter it."

Jensen said after each session, he would feel totally drained. Life at 34 was beginning to feel more like life at 84.

Jensen had been on the waiting list for about six months when he was visiting a doctor at the University Hospital about a new infection, one of many punishments his body had been enduring. The doctor was paged away to the emergency room to deal with a trauma victim. As Jensen was leaving the hospital, a second page called him to the nurse's desk.

"The nurse said, 'Stay on your antibiotics.' I didn't know what she meant," he said.

Late that night, a phone call interrupted the quiet of the Jensen household. It was a hospital representative: Jensen had a match.

Surprisingly, his reaction was mixed.

"It hit me that somebody just died, and that because that person had died I was going to be able to go on," he said. "That really bothered me all night."

But early the next morning, Jensen was in the operating room. Regulations then about donor-recipient communications were stricter than they are now, but one young technician whispered to Jensen as he took a blood sample that he knew the man who had died the day before.

He was a friend. He had gone out motorcycling, but left his helmet behind in favor of working on a tan. One mishap later, and he was providing Jensen with the organ he so badly needed.

"That made it harder," Jensen said.

Post-op

Doctors told Jensen afterward that as soon as they connected the new kidney, it started moving fluid like it had been there for years.

"Once I finally came out of the anaesthesia, I felt great. Absolutely great," Jensen said.

He was home eight days later. That's when he found the obituary.

Physically, life was great following the operation, Jensen said. He noticed immediate improvements in his condition. But, as happens in many cases, it wouldn't last.

About two years after the transplant, Jensen was feeling sick again. There was blood in his urine. And worst of all was the realization of that which he feared most: His new kidney was failing.

"A couple years later, to find out that one was quitting on me -- that was devastating," he said.

Doctors weren't sure why the kidney didn't take, he said. It wasn't, like many failures, that his body was rejecting the organ. Their best guess was that the disease that had claimed his natural kidneys, glomerulonephritis, had returned.

So Jensen was back on the waiting list -- and dialysis -- this time, for nine months. Eight months into the wait, the kidney had degraded to the point that doctors took drastic measures.

"It got so bad that they did have to remove it before I had my second transplant," he said. Jensen lived for a month with no functioning kidneys -- just machines to filter his blood and keep him alive.

The second operation wasn't as emotionally jarring, Jensen said, in part because he was familiar with the procedure.

"I didn't seem as close and personal with the donor this time," he said. Like the first donor, Jensen never learned who he was -- only that he had been 27, from Idaho, and, coincidentally, had also died in a motorcycle crash. And though he was of course grateful for the donation, he still considers the first operation to be the one that changed his life to this day.

Fortunately, the second kidney took. Eighteen years later, Jensen is still around to see his five grandkids on a regular basis. He's seen two of his four children wed and his business blossom. A small wooden clock on his office desk is inscribed with a reminder of his approach to life every day since those fateful incidents: "It's Time To Say Thank You."

Those wanting to donate a kidney anonymously to people at the top of the local waiting list can do so through the Utah Donor Registry's Good Samaritan Living Kidney Donation program. More information is available at www.yesutah.org.