This March, National Kidney Month, has been a time of celebration, gratitude and relief for Markesha Gonzalez. 

The New Britain wife and mother spent five years waiting for a kidney donor, to change her life as she lives with lupus nephritis. 

A day after sharing her story of hope and wait with NBC Connecticut, she learned an anonymous donor had come forward and was a match, and she’d be getting a transplant in less than two weeks.

“I was coming out of anesthesia, my husband said, the first words that were coming out of my mouth, I was just thinking God… I really thank God for this blessing because it just changes my whole family’s life,” Gonzalez said in an interview following her successful transplant surgery.

She’s a patient at Yale New Haven Health’s transplant center where at any given time, there can be as many as 750 patients waiting for a kidney donation and more than 100,000 waiting nationally. 

Doctors encourage those in need of donated kidneys to seek out living donors, because wait times for organs from deceased donors can reach a decade or more.

“It's one of those organs where you have a built in spare and if you have good kidney health, you should be able to donate and live the exact same life and do well in the long term,” said Dr. Danielle Haakinson, medical director of Yale New Haven’s Center for Living Organ Donors. 

She says people of color often face more challenging odds finding donors, as well as health challenges that exist within certain communities.

Over the five years she waited, Markesha eventually made a public appeal for a donor. Her sisters in her beloved Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority Inc. campaigned for her, too. Family and loved ones got tested, but no match. And then all of a sudden, the match appeared. It’s a person Markesha still doesn’t know because they’ve chosen to remain anonymous.

“It wasn't anybody from my circle. It wasn't a swap program. It was just a donor saying, 'I have a kidney,'” she said.

Markesha is at home recovering now with a new kidney her body is accepting well.

She’s optimistic and one thing she knows for certain, for the rest of her life, she’ll be encouraging others to give the same gift that changed hers.

“I can't even put into words how blessed I feel, how grateful I feel, I feel like it's going to change me. Because I want to help other people to really understand the need for a living donor,” she said.

You can learn more about becoming a living organ donor here.