Kidney disease survivor finds a new home in Omaha after lifesaving transplant at Nebraska Medicine

April is Donate Life Month, and for one newer Omaha resident, it’s a month that reminds her why she moved to Nebraska. Angela Steiner-Hernandez’s journey to Omaha was not an easy one.”I found out I had kidney disease about eight years before I got out here, and it was progressively getting worse,” Steiner-Hernandez said.Steiner-Hernandez is from California, where she says the wait for a kidney transplant could be 10 to 12 years.”I hadn’t heard anything from them in three and a half years, and I had to be my own advocate because I would probably be dead by then,” Steiner-Hernandez said.So, she turned to Nebraska Medicine.”Nebraska is the fastest state in the U.S., and so I signed up here, and within a year I had a kidney,” Steiner-Hernandez said.The call for that kidney came just as she was losing hope.”I was still working full time, and I was like, I can’t do it anymore, and he was like it’s OK, we’ll figure something out and they called me that night at 8 o’clock at night and said we got a kidney for you,” Steiner-Hernandez said.Nebraska Medicine says that in 2025, they transplanted patients from 14 different states.”We don’t have that same volume that we can make it more personalized. We’ve been doing this for 55 years, so we’ve had a chance to really hone down the system,” Jackie Tresemer, a nurse practitioner at Nebraska Medicine, said.Steiner-Hernandez said she loved the Nebraska nice attitude so much that after her transplant, she decided to move here. She even got a job as a nursing care coordinator at the same place that saved her life.”I really want to give back and show my appreciation and how grateful I am,” Steiner-Hernandez said.”Just having that knowledge and knowing that she wants to dedicate herself here and coming here is just truly amazing,” Tresemer said.