Friday, May 23, 2025
Maggie Goodman was scrolling through Facebook one day last October when saw a post from a woman looking for a kidney donor for her son. It turned out that the woman’s son was Goodman’s colleague, Thomas Coveney.
Goodman, 34, of Atlantic Beach, is a sixth-grade special-education teacher at I.S. 73 in Maspeth, Queens. Though Coveney, 47, teaches there, too, they weren’t well acquainted. But Goodman wanted to help anyway, got tested, and found out she was a biological match with Coveney.
Four months later, on Feb. 10, the transplant was performed in North Shore University Hospital’s Petrocelli Surgical Pavilion. On April 10, in a ceremony at Long Beach VFW Post 1384, Goodman was honored with a plaque by Dems by the Sea, a Long Beach-based Democratic community group, for her selfless act when Coveney seemed out of options.
“My son has never had a healthy day in his life,” Judy Cataldo, his mother, told Goodman and the crowd at the gathering. “You sometimes don’t realize that unless you have a chronic disease or physical disease, but health is a blessing, and we take it for granted. Thank you for giving me my son.”
Cataldo and Coveney first looked to their own family to try to find a compatible donor, but discovered that seven of Coveney’s first cousins had proteins in their kidneys that made them ineligible. That made it even more difficult to find a donor, because hospitals require potential donors answer questionnaires, put them through several tests and make sure they know exactly what they might be going through.
Even though Goodman knew she wanted to do it, the final decision wasn’t an easy one. She consulted, among others, her ob-gyn, to address concerns about pregnancy. She was assured she was healthy enough to go through with the transplant.
Afterward she was in the hospital for two nights and three days, and returned to I.S. 73 on Feb. 24. She feels great, she said, and takes daily walks and stays active, as her doctors recommended. Coveney is still recovering at home but is making progress.
“I think there’s a lot of misconceptions around organ donation in general,” Goodman said a last week’s ceremony. “I think it’s really a scary thing to a lot of people, and rightfully so — it’s your body. But with technology and all of the things that they’ve been able to develop over the years, it’s a completely laparoscopic surgery,” she added, referring to the fact that it is minimally invasive. “I was out walking within three days. We’re here now two months since, and I’ve been back to work for six weeks like pretty much nothing has changed for me.”
Coveney is more energized, and his mother said that for the first time in his life, he feels “really good.” He went to Target the other day to buy toothpaste, and, Cataldo said, “Even though it sounds kind of silly, in reality, it’s so great.” He hopes to return to teaching next month.
Roy Lester, the president of Dems by the Sea, presented Goodman with the plaque. It was described as the group’s “better angels” recognition, which Lester said relates directly to Goodman.
“Better angels is a term for what human beings should be, and we strive for it,” Lester said. “It’s a certificate of appreciation, Maggie, and we need more people like that — people who will do something.”
Dr. Ahmed Fahmy, who was part of the procedure, previously told the Herald that there are about 95,000 people on the transplant waiting list. In 2024, Fahmy said, there were about 25,000 transplants performed in the United States, and about 6,000 of them involved living donors. He emphasized the importance of donors like Goodman, explaining that those who receive kidneys from living donors tend to fare much better.
“She felt that this was something she always wanted to do,” Cataldo said. “She says it’s crazy, but I don’t think it’s crazy. I think it’s a miracle. So today my son has her kidney — and it’s called Ronaldo, because they both have the weirdest sense of humor.”
