It’s only August, but we already have a winner for the 2018 Daughter of the Year award: Dawn Muhammad.
After Muhammad’s father, Lucious Daniels, was diagnosed with kidney failure in Aug. 2016, she secretly started losing weight in the hopes of giving him her kidney.
Daniels was getting dialysis treatments twice a week to keep him alive while he sat on the waitlist for a new kidney, which was five years long.
“Being on dialysis was something that, in order for me to survive, was something that I had to do,” Daniels told Fox 5 in Atlanta. “I didn’t have a choice.”
Muhammad took a blood test, which indicated that her kidney could be a match, but her BMI was too high to qualify.
“It was just a shock,” she said of Daniels’ diagnosis. “So at that point, my journey began.”
The mom of two hired a personal trainer who helped her in the gym and gave her nutrition advice, and when she struggled to stick to her new, healthy lifestyle, Muhammad thought about her dad.
“If your goal is as important to you as you know it is, you’ve got to stick to that goal, no matter what,” she said.
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Over 16 months, Muhammad steadily lost weight, dropping a total of 55 lbs., 30 inches and went from a size 20 to a size 14. In April, she told her dad that she hoped to give him her kidney, and she learned on July 2 that they were a match.
“I received that phone call at 9 in the morning from the transplant center, and the first words were, ‘You are a perfect match with your father. You two are a perfect match,’ ” Muhammad said.
She told Daniels and their extended family the happy news, and the transplant is scheduled for Aug. 31.
“When it finally sunk in and I finally stopped crying, all I could do was just give her a hug,” Daniels said. “And like she said, the other family members were there as well so we all hugged and said a prayer and thanked God for his blessing.”
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