A Missouri couple isn’t sure if it was fate or coincidence that brought them together, but all it took was a call to a wrong number and now the couple is not only tied together in love but also by a kidney transplant.
Seven years ago, Kasey Bergh was on a business trip when she first made contact, accidentally texting the wrong number to ask a co-worker to hang out.
“I said, ‘Hey, it’s Kasey. Maria isn’t going to be here on time, and I was wondering if you’d want to hang out,'” Bergh told NBC-affiliate KSDK. “And I got this message back that said, ‘Sorry, you’ve got the wrong number. But if I wasn’t on my way to work, I’d hang out with you.”
The response was from Henry Glendening, a man 30 years Bergh’s junior, and it began a series of back-and-forth text messages speaking about various topics, including their shared interest of spirituality.
At one point, Glendening asked her age and she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch she knew she had to come clean.
“Here it is. I’m 53,” she told him.
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Her age didn’t matter to him.
“It really didn’t make any difference,” he said. “We were so connected at that point through deeper stuff.”
After even more texts, they decided to meet at a coffee shop.
But it was at a Third Eye Blind concert that same night when both of their plus-ones cancelled that it turned into something more.
“Halfway through the concert, he was standing behind me and put his hands on my hips, and I could have been that woman that said, ‘Hey, Bucko! You don’t put your hands on me.’ But I was just like, ‘Oh, well, this is interesting,'” she said.
While on a business trip, Glendening later said he would not be in contact but ended up checking into a hotel to call her. The next morning, he left her a voice message telling her that he loved her.
In 2015, they married along the Mississippi River.
Recently, their love story took a different turn.
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Bergh was a kidney transplant recipient in 1995 as a result of immunoglobulin A nephropathy, a condition in which an antibody lodges in the kidneys and damages their ability to filter waste from the blood.
Most successful transplants last many years, but according to the National Kidney Foundation, many people will need more than one transplant in a lifetime.
Early in the relationship, Glendening said he knew she might need a transplant and was willing to see if he could be the donor.
Soon after they married, Bergh’s kidneys began to fail, and once she was healthy enough after dialysis treatment and other health issues, they were able to get Glendening checked and confirmed as a viable donor.
Earlier this month, the procedure took place.
“When I got sick, he just stepped up just like a hero,” she told NBC. “Henry, it turns out, the way his kidney and body is formulated (is) that it’s a perfect immunological match so now I’m feeling amazing to think that it could last for as long as I need it to.”
Bergh said she doesn’t want people to necessarily see it as a fairy tale but said it’s still quite “random.”
“They might meet somebody in a random way. He might be 30 years younger than them, and they might go, after they’re in it, they might just be like, ‘Oh, this is hard.’ We’re a work in progress and we have worked and worked.”
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