A
MAKING
HIS STUDENT’S
TRANSPLANT
POSSIBLE
WHEN FINN LANNING LEARNED THAT
12-YEAR-OLD DAMIEN NEEDED A LIFE-SAVING
KIDNEY TRANSPLANT, HE DIDN’T HESITATE
TO OPEN HIS HEART—AND HIS HOME
By CAITLIN KEATINGI
t was an unexpectedly emotional moment
for math and science teacher Finn
Lanning—who still remembers when
Damien, then one of his seventh-grade stu-
dents, told him why he wouldn’t be return-
ing to AXL Academy in Aurora, Colo., following the
school’s Thanksgiving break in November 2018. “He
was one of the few new students,” recalls Lanning.
“He was studious and smart and funny, and he was
in a couple of my elective classes as well, so we’d got-
ten to know each other a little bit.” But that after-
noon the then-12-year-old revealed that he had fo-
cal segmental glomerulosclerosis, an autoimmune
disease that had seriously damaged his kidneys. To
make matters more complicated, Damien had also
been in foster care for the past four years. “It was
hard for him to find placement because he was sick,”
says Lanning, 37. “He told me he had to leave the
foster home he was living in and was moving into
the hospital because they didn’t have another place
for him. I remember kind of sitting there with him
and not really knowing what to say.”
But deep down Lanning, who is single, already
knew what he wanted to do. In the weeks that fol-
lowed, he began regularly visiting Damien at Den-
ver’s Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center—64 March 2, 2020