Friday was a normal day for my friend Barbie Levin, an occupational therapist. She went to the home of a brand-new patient, a baby who'd had a stroke in utero, was now age 1 and was still not crawling. One leg was too weak.

As the mom watched, Barbie got down on the floor and placed the baby into crawling position. Then she asked the mom to go get the baby's favorite food — a veggie stick. As the baby tried to propel herself forward but couldn't, Barbie propped the weak leg up, and the baby managed a tiny scoot. Then Barbie had the mom do the same re-propping.

The baby took her first three "steps" ever. She reached the treat and, said Barbie, smiling broadly, "ate it with relish." As she left, the mother stunned with joy, Barbie felt pretty good.

And also pretty bad.

Like that baby, Barbie was born with a medical problem: something wrong with her urinary tract that affected her kidneys. As a little kid in the 1950s and '60s, she was in and out of the hospital in an era when people were a lot less sensitive to what that feels like for a child. "The nurses would practice catheterizing on me," Barbie, 61, recalls.

Each stay at the hospital lasted about a week, and she never knew when another one was coming. "My mom would wake me up and say, 'It's a hospital week!'" Barbie would be overwhelmed with terror. Probes and pain and loneliness loomed, as did the humiliation of having interns, mostly men, coming in to examine her urinary tract and discuss it as if she weren't there.

Thank goodness for the arts and crafts lady who made her daily rounds. Barbie made a set of tiny dolls. She kept them for 40 years.

By then, Barbie was a real mom, a single mom by choice. "I spent all those years working with and falling in love with other people's children," she says. "It was time to have my own."

But her kidneys, damaged since childhood, were starting to fail. A few years ago, the doctors told her she'd probably need a transplant, and they were right.

The wait for a kidney from a deceased donor in our state, New York, is seven to nine years. Because the wait is so long and because a kidney donated by a living person tends to last up two twice as long as a cadaver kidney, Barbie started a blog called Barbie's Kidney Quest.

How do you explain to the world who you are and why someone might want to consider giving you a kidney?

Barbie's now-college-age daughter, Yona, took a stab at it. She and her mom sing together in the kitchen. They watch a lot of murder mysteries on TV, the British ones. Yona grew up watching her mom checking in on elderly neighbors.

As Barbie's friend, I watch and marvel, too. She loves learning everything, from carpentry to cocktail-making. She invented a grated ginger cocktail in 2012 that is still the talk of our circle. She made her own guitar — and couch — and just did a glassblowing class with her daughter.

She's a lot more indefatigable than her organs.

I did a little research and found out that giving a kidney does not shorten the donor's life or compromise the donor's health. So I got tested to see whether I would be a match. I'm not. Turns out I couldn't do a "swap," either, where I'd give my kidney to a patient I match and that patient's would-be donor, a match for Barbie, would give her a kidney. So instead, I am introducing you to her.

A childhood spent at the hospital. An adulthood spent making ailing kids better and parents weep for joy. Endless curiosity. Deep friendships. And a loving daughter she loves back, more than the moon and the stars.

A life worth saving.

Barbie.

Lenore Skenazy is author of the book and blog "Free-Range Kids" and a hilarious keynote speaker at conferences, companies and schools. Run out and get her book "Has the World Gone Skenazy?" To learn more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.