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Over a thousand miles apart on opposite sides of the country, Frankie Pompa and Anthony Gonzalez faced the same dilemma: they needed new kidneys. Severe kidney disease had upended their once-active lives and tethered them to dialysis machines. They faced a long crawl through waitlists for a matching organ donor before they could receive a transplant. Family members offered to help Pompa and Gonzalez by donating their own kidneys. But when Pompa’s sister, Joely Sanders, and Gonzalez’s wife, Tracey Gonzalez, volunteered, they received crushing news: their organs were not compatible with their loved ones. Pompa’s sister couldn’t help him. Gonzalez’s wife couldn’t help him. But, Pompa and Gonzalez later learned, they could help each other. (Wu, 1/28)

Spc. Christian Sutton and his team of nearly two dozen other young soldiers have signed up nearly 6,000 troops as potential bone marrow donors since March 2022. The effort by members of the Army's rank and file fills a critical void amid a nationwide shortage of donors and has become one of the most significant grassroots health care initiatives in the service's recent history. (Beynon, 1/30)

The blog post that has shaken the leadership of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, one of the world’s preeminent cancer research centers, was written some 3,000 miles away, in a bare-walled, sparsely decorated flat, save for a stack of statistics books and a collection of Rubik’s Cubes. It’s here that Sholto David, an unemployed scientist with a doctorate in cell and molecular biology, spends his time poring over research papers looking for images with clues that they’ve been manipulated in some way to portray misleading findings — perhaps duplicated, spliced or cropped, or partially obscured. (Joseph, 1/27)

When Irv Cross applied for money from the NFL concussion settlement in 2018, his dementia was obvious to anyone who spent more than a few minutes with him. At 78, the former NFL player and trailblazing sports broadcaster struggled to speak coherently, forgot to change his clothes and suffered from urinary incontinence, his wife told doctors. Cross had been diagnosed with dementia by another doctor months before he was evaluated by two NFL settlement doctors, his medical records show. (Hobson, 1/31)

Some new mothers say postpartum care centers are the best part of childbirth in South Korea, where fewer people are deciding to have children because of high costs. (Charlton, 1/28)

In 2022, the D.C. government announced a pilot program that offered 132 new and expecting low-income mothers $10,800 over the course of a year — no strings attached — intended to assess how unconditional cash payments could improve their families’ outcomes and economic mobility. Facilitated by the nonprofit Martha’s Table, the $1.5 million Strong Families, Strong Futures pilot was limited to families in Wards 5, 7 and 8, which contain some of the District’s poorest neighborhoods. The city’s program was based on similar successful cash-transfer pilots that have now been modeled in at least 100 U.S. jurisdictions and drew 1,553 applications in just three weeks, requiring a lottery system to winnow down the final group. (Brice-Saddler, 2/1)

Andrey Shevelyov would rather live on the street than take antipsychotic medication. Should it be his decision to make? (Barry, 1/28)

A pair of city police officers pulled their patrol vehicle behind a red Mazda stopped around 4 p.m. on a dreary day last winter in the middle of the road in an industrial stretch of South Baltimore. The car was running, hazard lights flashing. The windshield wipers squeaked across the glass. Inside, the officers found the car keys and a wallet. But the driver was nowhere to be found. (Mann, 1/26)

Dr. Thomas Connelly has turned the cliché “million dollar smile” into reality. In 2021, the “Father of Diamond Dentistry” — as Rolling Stone named him — reconstructed Post Malone’s smile with 18 porcelain veneers, eight platinum crowns and two six-carat diamonds replacing the singer-songwriter’s upper canines. Just diamonds. The total cost: $1.6 million.“Posty needed me; he had terrible teeth,” said Dr. Connelly, 51, seated comfortably on a sofa in one of his treatment rooms in his Beverly Hills office. (Cheney, 1/30)

Dick Traum, who was regarded as the first person to run a marathon on a prosthetic leg, finishing New York’s race in 1976, and who went on to found the Achilles Track Club to encourage other disabled athletes in an era when they faced barriers to participation in sports, died on Jan. 23 in Manhattan. He was 83. (Gabriel, 1/31)