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Best Father's Day Gift Of All: A New Lease On Life

CHICAGO (CBS) -- This Father's Day was one that a Homer Glen man is going to relish for the rest of his life. So will his family.

While his family was eating hamburgers and Italian sausages on Father's Day, 70-year-old Chuck Cuttone was eating Rice Krispies. He was preparing for the next day, when he would get the best gift he could hope for: a kidney transplant from his 40-year-old daughter, Beth Kohlstedt.

"She's the hero here, as Dr. Mital calls her," he said.

Dr. Deepak Mital, surgical director of the kidney transplant program at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, said the national waiting list is about 100,000 names long, but more people would not have to wait if relatives would become living donors, like Kohlstedt.

Kohlstedt said she would do it again "in a heartbeat."

"I really want to make sure that everybody knows that it is safe, and that more people really need to do this," she said.

Cuttone said all four of his daughters were tested to see if any of them were possible donor matches.

"All four of my daughters gave me an ultimatum that we weren't going to wait for a cadaver, another kidney," Cuttone said.

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All four daughters were a match to some degree. Kohlstedt and her youngest sister matched on 5 of 6 markers. The other two sisters matched on 4 of 6.

"It was completely 100% our idea. My father was very, very against taking an organ from one of his children, and we did not give him a choice," Kohlstedt said.

Mital said all four of them could have been donors. He wishes more people would donate kidneys to family and friends. He said, had Cuttone not received a living organ donation, he would have been put on the waiting list for about five years, and also needed to undergo dialysis.

"Thanks to her generous gift, he will never need dialysis. He never saw a dialysis machine and never will," Mital said.

Kohlstedt said she's just glad she could do something that gives her father a chance at a much longer life.

"Everybody keeps using the word hero, and a gift-giver. I, obviously, probably haven't processed it, either, because I don't view it that way at all. I just view it as something that we went in, we did, and now he gets a chance to live his life, hopefully for another good 15, 20 years," she said.

The surgical procedure was minimally invasive.

Kohlstedt was out of the hospital the next day. Her father was released from the hospital three days after the surgery. All are reported to be doing well now.

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