Some 90,0000 people in the United States are awaiting a kidney donation. One California mother took it into her own hands to try and get a donor, and you've probably already seen her plea for help.

Along northbound Interstate 5 by the Sacramento International Airport stands a billboard.

"I need a kidney transplant," said Cynthia Hall.

Hall hopes that with her billboard she will reach the right person.

"Six years ago, I got a call from my doctor that my kidneys are severely damaged," Hall said.

Her husband Art said they knew they would reach the point where they needed to expand their outreach one day.

"We have been doing a homegrown campaign, if you will," Art said. "Making flyers, putting them up at businesses. We have done social media campaigns. I thought I need to take this to the next level to see what's possible to do and that's where I thought I would try a billboard."

That's when Marquee Media received a call from a friend who heard about the Hall family.

"When we formed our company, we wanted to have business with purpose. This is the highest purpose we can probably do," said Jeff Joaquin with Marquee Media.

There are 11 billboards across the Sacramento, California, region, reaching about 2 million people every week. There are also dozens of billboards across the country.

"We help companies and brands sell products, help their businesses along, but we can have a higher calling to help somebody get a kidney and save a life, it's just something immeasurable," Joaquin said.

The Hall family hopes it raises more awareness about kidney diseases.

"There are millions of people out there with this disease and they do not know they have it," Cynthia said.

"If anything comes of all this, besides her getting a kidney donor, is raising the awareness of kidney disease out there," Art said.

The hope is that on their four-year wedding anniversary, they will get the call that will give Cynthia a second chance at life.

"It means the world to us and my son, he's 14. I want to see him go to college, I want to see him get married, I want to be with him and this will give me a chance to live my life to the fullest," Cynthia said.

If you would like to help you can reach the Hall family at akidneyforcynthia@gmail.com or at 916-276-7603.

Watch the video above for the full story.

The gift of life came in the nick of time for an Ohio man.

WLWT, a Hearst station, first interviewed Mark Plummer in April 2022.

He was suffering from interstitial lung disease, an incurable lung disease that causes stiffening of the lungs, and his insurance would not cover the transplant he needed.

Less than a year later, he has a new set of lungs.

Doctors still don't know what caused him to develop the disease, but Mark Plummer said he is eternally grateful to the person who saved his life by being an organ donor.

"It is absolutely a second chance at life," he said. "We started calling it the gift."

Mark Plummer was admitted to a hospital in Columbus, Ohio, in early April. Family, friends and complete strangers helped pay the bill.

"I got donations from all over the country. We were amazed. Your story got picked up by stations all over the place," Mark Plummer said.

Ohio State's Wexner Medical Center covered the rest through financial aid.

Mark Plummer received his life-saving transplant on April 19.

"I was very, very, very sick, so my recovery was much rougher than most people," he said.

After the surgery, his kidneys went into shock. He was on dialysis for a month and spent a total of eight weeks in the intensive care unit. Then he spent time in rehab and another three weeks in Columbus for observation before heading home to Cincinnati.

"I knew he had it in him, but it was scary," Mark's wife, Linda Plummer, said. "I don't have to worry about him as much anymore. I don't wake up and — how loud is he breathing, is he breathing OK, checking his numbers."

He is now healthy enough to return to work and started a new job with Capabilities Driving School, teaching teens and young adults with disabilities how to drive. He is back to playing with his grandkids, including an adorable new grandson, and walking his two dogs around the neighborhood.

"I can pretty much do what anyone else can do, up to — I'm not ready to run a marathon yet," he joked. "Organ donation does save lives, and I'm sitting here talking to you as living proof that it really does save lives. And I'm looking forward to hopefully living at least another fifteen to twenty years because of that gift."

Now he plans to pay that generous gift forward.

"Why not? Why not pay it forward and help somebody?" Mark Plummer said. "Somebody helped me."

Several weeks ago, Mark Plummer saw a post on Nextdoor by a young woman named Bra'Naye Willis. She and her boyfriend rent an apartment at the Williamsburg Apartments of Cincinnati, and she was looking for advice. She said their apartment had no heat, there were leaks and air quality issues, among other problems.

"I had an asthma attack most recently in December because I couldn't breathe because of the air quality conditions," Bra'Naye Willis said. "It hurts me that people just really don't care about any of us."

The apartment complex has been in the news for months for a series of health and safety violations. The city of Cincinnati filed a lawsuit against the owners in January.

"Both her and her boyfriend, they suffer from lung issues, so that made a connection with me immediately," Mark Plummer said. "Someone who has asthma doesn't need to be in an environment like that."

He started a GoFundMe page for the couple to help them move somewhere else before their lease is up. He also made the first donation.

He is determined not to take his second chance at life for granted and said he is "eternally grateful" to the donor's family.

"On the worst day of their lives, they lost a loved one. That became the best day of my life," he said.

“This is a picture of her in high school,” Beck Owen said, going through photos of her daughter Melissa.

“Our daughter passed seven years ago this past Christmas Eve. She was 38,” Paul Owen, her father, said.

Becky and Paul Owen’s daughter passed away shortly after a brain aneurysm and a stroke.

“It was pretty immediate, her passing,” he said.

Before her death, she had chosen to be an organ donor.

“Like most of us, when we sign up on our driver's license when we’re 16, we tend to forget it. It’s there," Paul Owen said. "We see the heart under our name or our birth date, and we’re aware of it, but we seem to almost forget about it."

Melissa was able to donate multiple organs, including her heart.

“I mean, she’s a hero to us. She’s a hero to those families because she’s allowed that,” Paul Owen said.

A report from the United Network for Organ Sharing said that in 2021, deceased donation continued an 11-year record trend, with 41,354 organ transplants performed in the U.S., which was an increase of 5.9% over 2020.

“Our goal is to get as many Arkansans as possible registered to become donors because a registered donor makes the process of recovering organs so much smoother,” Audrey Coleman, the director of communications for the Arkansas Regional Organ Recovery Agency, said.

The agency is also known as ARORA. They educate the public on organ donation and recover the organs in their territory for transplant as they become available.

“Even during the pandemic, our register numbers stayed up,” she said.

Aside from deciding when you get your license, Coleman helped implement these kiosks in public areas around Arkansas to help boost interest.

“More people are registered, more people are getting the information,” she said. And one of the reasons could be due to more access to registration points.

“Just a couple of years ago, for the first time, we passed the point wherein the United States more than 50% of adults were on an organ donor registry,” Brian Shepard, the CEO of the United Network for Organ Sharing, said.

Of the 57 organ procurement organizations – OPOs for short – in the U.S., 49 saw an increase in donation over their 2020 total. ARORA included.

“The OPOs, we come together and share what we call best practices among all the OPOs to find out what everyone’s doing. What’s working in their areas and bring that back to our area to make sure we’re optimizing everything we do for every donation opportunity, every organ donor, and every transplant,” Mark Tudor, the CEO of ARORA, said.

“We’re doing two organ donors currently right now, and we have the potential to save eight to 10 more lives today,” he said.

As interest in being a donor grows, Becky and Paul Owen also play a vital role in sharing their message and the importance of organ donation at events large and small.

“It’s that gift that keeps on giving because you can extend someone's life that would not otherwise be able to keep on living,” Paul Owen said.

U.S. doctors have transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life — a first for medical science.

Doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine said Monday the patient is doing well three days after surgery.

The patient is 57-year-old David Bennett, a Maryland handyman too sick to get a human heart.

Bennett said before the surgery: “I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice.”

Friday’s surgery showed for the first time that a gene-edited animal heart can function in the human body without immediate rejection.

According to USA TODAY, Bennett is breathing on his own without a ventilator. However, he reportedly is still on an ECMO machine that helps pump blood through his body. USA Today says doctors plan to slowly wean him off the machine.

"This was a breakthrough surgery and brings us one step closer to solving the organ shortage crisis. There are simply not enough donor human hearts available to meet the long list of potential recipients,” said Bartley P. Griffith, MD, who surgically transplanted the pig heart into Bennett.

According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, more than 100,000 Americans are currently waiting for an organ transplant, and more than 6,000 patients die each year before receiving a transplant.