Working with the team at the Center for Living Donation, Penn Medicine’s benefits director Jen Brady felt confident enough to donate a kidney to her mother and run the Boston Marathon several months post-surgery.
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On a Wednesday in September, Jen Brady scheduled her surgery to give her mother one of her kidneys. Then she registered for her third Boston Marathon.
Signing up to run the April 2026 race six months after donating an organ was a quiet declaration: Brady could make a life-changing gift to her mom while holding onto one of the parts of herself that mattered most.
Six months after donating a kidney to her mother through Penn Medicine’s Center for Living Donation, Jen Brady (right) ran her third Boston Marathon.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine News)
“Running is my way of keeping control of my thoughts, and giving myself something to work for, and reaching my goals, and doing hard things,” says Brady, the director of employee benefits and well-being at the University of Pennsylvania Health System. “That’s something that I never want to not have.”
Brady’s work as the director of benefits and well-being at Penn Medicine is rooted in a simple truth: When people come to work, they don’t stop being caregivers, parents, and human beings. Her own “whole-person” story—how she supported her mother through kidney donation, using Penn’s living donor paid leave benefit herself, and then trained for a marathon just weeks after—exemplifies the very employee well-being and caregiving support she works to make possible.
Her care team with Penn Medicine’s Center for Living Donation assured Brady that after a short period away from running to allow her body to recover from the surgery, she could expect to return to her pre-surgery fitness levels. Nephrologist Amanda Leonberg-Yoo, the medical director of Penn Medicine’s living kidney donor program and a runner herself, even offered to be a training buddy.
A few years after her father died, Brady’s mother, Terri, discovered her kidney function levels were getting worse. Brady knew she lived with diabetes and high blood pressure, but her mother had managed her health on her own. Brady hadn’t realized the extent of her mom’s kidney disease.
Brady transferred her mom’s care to Penn Medicine, where nephrologist Matthew Denker helped slow the decline, but told them a kidney transplant would eventually be necessary.
By the spring of 2025, Terri had entered end-stage kidney disease. She needed a new kidney to avoid initiating dialysis.
Working with the team at Penn’s Center for Living Donation, Brady moved through the testing process; she was a perfect match for her mother.
Their surgeries at the Clifton Center for Medical Breakthroughs at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania on Oct. 1, 2025, were straightforward and complication-free. Brady spent one night in the hospital and then took it easy for the rest of October. She followed her care team’s exercise orders. For the first six weeks post-donation, she simply walked, so as not to jar her core muscles as they healed from the incision. Then, she started back with short runs.
Leonberg-Yoo instructed Brady that maintaining hydration and electrolytes would be especially important when doing long runs, now that her kidney was working on its own, and she had to avoid ibuprofen to protect her remaining kidney. In general, living kidney donation gives donors a greater awareness of their own health and the desire to maintain a healthy and balanced life post-donation, Leonberg-Yoo says.
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