Erin Rollman and Adam Leventhal both live in Colorado, but they don’t live in the same worlds. He’s an orthodox Hasidic Jew. She’s an atheist vegan. He teaches religion. She’s an actor.

But in at least one essential way, they could not be more alike. They are two of only four living Coloradans who have donated one of their kidneys to a stranger this year.

So they have saving lives in common. They just wish that weren’t so uncommon.

Leventhal, 28, visited Rollman, 38, at Porter Adventist Hospital on Aug. 23, just after Rollman said, “Goodbye and good luck, little lefty” to her kidney, which was flown to Virginia and transplanted into a critical young patient she may never meet.

His message to Rollman: “I am happy for you.”

“I meant that you will be better for having done this,” said Leventhal, who fully expects Rollman to feel the same euphoria that has enveloped him since March, when he gave his kidney to a father of five in Brooklyn.

And because Rollman signed up for a groundbreaking paired program called the National Kidney Registry, her sacrifice set off a chain reaction of transplantations that saved three lives in three states in back-to-back-to-back operations. “And I am certain the chain will continue past those three,” said Jessica Johnson, Porter’s transplant coordinator. That’s because the chain Rollman triggered is only in its initial phase.

The gift

Here’s how it works: Most kidney-failure patients have a willing, living donor.

Before, if they don’t match, that’s the end of it — and often, the patient’s life. Now, should the NKR database identify a compatible kidney for a dying patient, that person’s healthy donation partner agrees to give up a kidney that then goes to another stranger, perpetuating what Leventhal calls “a beautiful chain that keeps on giving life.”

But it takes what the NKR calls a “Good Samaritan” donor — someone who offers up a kidney without stipulation — to set a new chain in motion. Rollman’s 4.72-inch miracle bean went to a patient in Virginia whose healthy partner’s kidney then went to Ohio. Soon another kidney there was on its way to Wisconsin.

One expected recipient became too sick for transplant, which left the chain at three links so far. A chain typically averages six transplants, the NKR says, but a single altruistic donor once touched off a wave of more than 40 kidney donations. A chain usually ends when a child’s life is at stake. In those cases, a kidney is given regardless of whether the child has a healthy donor partner.

These chains are revolutionizing the transplant industry by drastically reducing the number of Americans awaiting kidneys, the critical organs that cleanse the blood of waste. Currently, that number is at just under 100,000. Last year, 6,000 died waiting. In Colorado, while more than 1,660 people await a kidney, someone dies every four days. Paired donation is dropping the wait time for recipients by an average of 78 percent, the NKR says, from 51 months to just 11.

Colorado is considered a generous organ-donor state. Last year, 67 percent of residents who applied for their driver’s license or state ID cards checked the box for organ, eye and tissue donors in the event of death, second only to Alaska.

The nationwide average, according to The Donor Alliance, is only 42 percent.

But the very concept of living donation — involving a kidney or liver — is still foreign to most anyone not facing the imminent death of a loved one. It was to Rollman.

“I am crazy relaxed about this,” Rollman said in an interview one month before her operation. In the subsequent weeks, she said, “I never had a single doubt in my mind.”

The surgery

Rollman wasn’t worried, she said, because she did her research. With the help of the Denver-based American Transplant Foundation, she learned that, statistically, kidney donation is less dangerous than childbirth. That less than 1 percent of living kidney donors ever experience complications. That donation does not reduce life span.

That the surgery is minimally invasive. And, perhaps most important to Rollman: That while the five-year survival rate for kidney patients on dialysis is just 35 percent, it is 81 percent for patients who receive a kidney from a living donor.

Rollman would like to live in a world where giving up an organ to a stranger is not considered unusual or heroic. So when Porter spokesman Tim Shonsey calls her good deed “the ultimate exercise in good faith and goodwill,” she doesn’t know what to do with the compliment.

“When someone tells me, ‘You make the world a better place,’ I just say, ‘Well … so do you … because they generally do,” Rollman said. “There are a million ways to do good things in the world, and this is just one of them.”

Leventhal calls Rollman “an ordinary person doing something extraordinary — that other ordinary people could do as well.”

Rollman didn’t know living donation “was even a thing” until she found out her friend Mara Wiles was on dialysis. Dialysis isn’t a cure, Wiles said. “It delays death.”

Four years ago, Wiles was a healthy 24-year-old distance runner who was establishing herself as a local stand-up comedian. Then she started to notice arthritis-like pain, cloudy thinking and extreme fatigue, followed by three years of decline and a lupus diagnosis. In April 2012, she went into kidney failure on a flight home from her grandfather’s funeral. Three months after that, she was on dialysis and chemotherapy.

She was placed on the kidney transplant list, and stayed there for seven months.

Wiles went public with her need for a donor on social media, and it was hard to ask for help. “I don’t even ask for a ride to the airport,” she said. But more than 30 of her friends and family got themselves tested for compatibility — including Rollman, who only knew Wiles at that time from seeing her perform. “I thought she was weird and kind of funny — like me,” Rollman said.

There was a match, but it wasn’t a relative, and it wasn’t Rollman. Instead, it was Jessica Anderson, Wiles’ best friend dating back to elementary school. When Anderson, now a schoolteacher in Los Angeles, learned she was a match, she called Wiles and said, “I hope you are ready to take care of my kidney for the rest of your life.”

Anderson flew home for the surgery during her spring break. It took place March 8.

“It was like someone had flicked a switch, and everything worked again,” said Wiles, whose autoimmune disease has also gone dormant since the surgery. “I didn’t think it could be this good again.”

About three weeks after Wiles’ surgery, Rollman had an epiphany. “If I were willing to give my kidney to Mara,” she said, “Why wouldn’t I give it up for a stranger?”

The question sent chills down Rollman’s mother’s spine.

“I feel like I raised a gem,” said Georgianne Rollman. “I know it is a great thing she is doing. But as a mother, you can’t help but worry. We all know people who go into the hospital with nothing, and come out of it with something.”

When Rollman officially passed her barrage of tests, she asked the probability there would be a match. Johnson told her, unequivocally, it was 100 percent. It took two hours for the NKR database to identify a match for Rollman.

And at that moment, she said. ” I knew this was happening.”

“You are the needle in the haystack that someone has been waiting years for,” Leventhal said. “For the people who match? They have won the lottery.”

The legacy

Leventhal, a graduate of the Rocky Mountain Hebrew Academy and Denver Jewish Day School, discovered living organ donation in an online newspaper that serves the Chabad-Lubavitch communities.

“I felt such a high from reading that article that I reached out to get tested right away,” he said. “I did not want the inspiration to fade.”

Leventhal learned he was a unique match with a man who had a very high antibody count — meaning he was at great risk to reject a kidney from anyone else.

Leventhal flew to Brooklyn for the operation in March just to make the transplantation easier on both the recipient and his doctors.

In most cases, donors and recipients know nothing about each other until at least three months after the operation, if ever. But when Leventhal arrived, he was asked to meet with the recipient, his wife and three children. When Leventhal walked into the man’s hospital room, the wife told her husband, “This is the angel that God has sent you.”

“I will live with those moments forever,” Leventhal sad.

Rollman’s surgery was scheduled for 5 a.m. on Aug. 23. The surgery, led by Dr. Peter Kennealey, took just two hours, and it was without incident, Shonsey said. Rollman woke up a little foggy, muttering something about the middle-schoolers who used to play catch with her cat when she was a kid. “That’s pretty terrible, isn’t it?” she mumbled, to the great amusement of her many waiting friends.

“She’s not used to medication,” said fellow actor Brian Colonna.

Rollman was released from the hospital the next day. While patients are told to expect a three-week recovery, Rollman resumed a relatively active routine by Sunday. She worked, played games and even went out to dinner. She was a little sore but otherwise, she said, “I feel great. No joke.”

Rollman thinks of living organ donation as a normal behavior that is “just not yet normalized.” For the recipients like Wiles, “It’s just very humbling and inspiring to know that we are all on this planet together.”

Evan Weissman of the eclectic Buntport Theater, which Rollman started with six pals from Colorado College, says what Rollman did was “expand her moral imagination.”

Rollman has been informed that all three transplants her donation triggered have been successful. She has no regrets. Leventhal has just one.

“That I can’t do it again,” he said.

Kidney donation

Facts and figures

119,348: Americans awaiting organ transplant (all organ types)

97,270: Americans awaiting kidney transplant

1,661: Coloradans awaiting kidney transplant

6,000: Americans who died in 2012 awaiting kidney transplants

82: Coloradans who died in 2012 awaiting kidney transplants

6,000: Living donations now occurring each year in the U.S. (all organ types)

33: Overall living kidney donors in Colorado, 2013

60: Cadaver kidney donors in Colorado, 2013

51 months: Average kidney transplant wait time (national average)

11 months: Average kidney transplant wait time (patients with living donor partners)

About donations

Living donors are never paid, but the Denver-based American Transplant Foundation will help compensate donors with unpaid wages, rent, food and other expenses while they are recovering.

There are four kidney transplant centers in Colorado:

Children’s Hospital

University of Colorado

Porter Adventist

Presbyterian St. Luke’s

Sources: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, American Transplant Foundation, National Kidney Registry, The Donor Alliance, United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS)

For more information on shared kidney donation:

kidneyregistry.org

americantransplant foundation.org

donoralliance.org

unos.org