By GREGORY ZELLER //
A middle-school teacher from Rego Park is alive and well and preparing to return to his classroom, thanks to a surprise gift from a virtual stranger.
Thomas Coveney, a 47-year-old social studies teacher at IS 73 in Maspeth, was added to the Northwell Transplant Institute’s kidney transplant list about six months ago, after dealing with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis – scar tissue in the glomerulus, the kidney’s filtering unit, resulting in protein loss – for the better part of a decade.
Getting on the list signaled a worsening of his condition, but did not represent a quick ticket to better health.
According to Northwell Health, the wait for a kidney in the United States can be as long as a decade – and while cadaver kidneys can work, transplanting a spare kidney from a living donor almost universally leads to better outcomes for the recipient.
About a third of the 207 adult kidney transplants performed by Northwell surgeons in 2024 involved a living donor, according to the New Hyde Park-based health system, and most of those were living familial donations.
Ahmed Fahmy: Living proof.
Those numbers pace statistics compiled by the United Network for Organ Sharing, a Virginia-based nonprofit that administers the nation’s only organ procurement and transplantation network: The UNOS recorded 2,982 adult kidney transplants in the Northeast region last year, with nearly 1,000 coming courtesy of living donors.
Unfortunately for Coveney, none of his family members were a close enough genetic match – setting up a potentially long wait for the right fit.
With his condition deteriorating, the Northwell Transplant Institute and the teacher’s family got proactive, sharing social media posts and other outreach efforts to find a donor in time.
A post on Coveney’s mother’s Facebook page caught the attention of East Atlantic Beach resident Maggie Goodman, a middle school special-education teacher with the New York City Department of Education. Goodman and Coveney were not close friends – she didn’t even know they were Facebook friends until she saw his mother’s post – but said she felt compelled to act when reading about his plight.
The special-ed instructor credited the urge to her undergraduate studies at Boston College.
“Being in service to others is a credo at Boston College,” Goodman noted.
Best in the biz: The Northwell Transplant Institute is No. 1 in New York State for three-year patient survival following adult kidney transplants, according to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients.
With that in mind, the 34-year-instructor and certified data scientist had herself tested for genetic compatibility with Coveney – and discovered she was a spot-on match.
“I was in a unique position to help,” Goodman noted. “It was meant to be.”
The two teachers underwent dual transplant surgeries inside North Shore University Hospital’s state-of-the-art Petrocelli Surgical Pavillion on Feb. 10, with surgeon Ahmed Fahmy removing Goodman’s kidney and surgeon Aaron Winnick completing the transplantation.
Fahmy, Northwell’s director of pediatric kidney transplantation and an assistant professor at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, lamented the “gap that we want to fill” between donor-kidney supply and demand, particularly since “the outcome of living-donor donation is better than the outcome of deceased donors.”
“We look for people like Maggie to come forward to donate a kidney,” the surgeon said in a statement. “People who receive a living donor kidney do far better.”
That has proven true in this case: Coveney “did amazingly well after surgery and went home after four days,” according to Winnick, and Goodman is already back in class.
The shared kidney – which the two teachers named “Renaldo” – is functioning properly and Coveney is hoping to return to work in May. On Wednesday, back at NSUH for a regularly scheduled follow-up and a photo op with Goodman, he called the life-saving donation “both unexpected and amazing.”
“It’s such a relief,” Coveney said. “It brought back my faith in humanity.
“There are good people willing to do selfless things.”
