Transplantation: the gift of life
On October 5, 2016, two women walked into Auckland City Hospital. They couldn’t have been more different. Frankie Egglestone was a 29-year-old single mother who stood just under five feet tall, liked hip-hop music and disliked coffee – even though she worked as a barista. Lianne Bateman was also a single mother, but she was just under six feet tall, a dental hygienist and devoted Christian with a thing for British actor Jason Statham.
Yet these two women’s lives were about to be connected forever by an act of staggering selflessness: Lianne was donating her left kidney to Frankie. What’s more, when Lianne first made the offer several years earlier, she’d known Frankie for
