"My dad is just such a steadying force."
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To the son who grew up learning life lessons from Hugh Macdonald, it hardly comes as a surprise that Hugh sees his own serious condition as a chance to help other veterans, and that he says doing dialysis three days a week is "by no means is it a chore, it's a blessing," because that dialysis is keeping him alive.
"That's the example that he sets for my sisters and I and the rest of our family, it's humility and selflessness and trying to help other people all the time," Mike Macdonald said. "So I'm not surprised. That's him. My dad is just such a steadying force. Talk about high character, high integrity, a right and wrong way to go about things. I'm sure he's thinking about what type of example he's trying to set for his kids. Those are the things that are going through his mind. This is an opportunity to pave the way for his family on how to handle adversity, things like that. That's how he thinks, it's pretty cool."
Throughout his first year with the Seahawks, Mike Macdonald's reverence for the military and the people who serve has regularly been on display, be it in the visitors he brings to practice or the language he uses with the team and in press conferences or several other little things that demonstrate the influence of growing up the son of a West Point man.
"When I was a kid, I went to bed at night on West Point stories," he said. "Those were my bedtime stories as a kid. So that's really as far back as I can remember, it was just the pride that my dad had with his classmates and the way they impacted the world, and then just understanding these are the people that have volunteered to put it on the line for our country. There's a deep respect for that. My dad, he was in the military right at the end of the Vietnam War, and I remember one of the first times I ever saw my dad cry was at the Vietnam Memorial. That was a really moving experience when I was a kid, just seeing how emotional he was."
As a child, Mike Macdonald was moved as he witnessed his father's respect for those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and now all these years later, Hugh Macdonald is setting another example for Mike and his daughters Maggie and Kate. Yes, Hugh Macdonald needs your help, but so do a heck of a lot of other veterans, and he wants to make sure people understand that the father of an NFL head coach is no more or less deserving of consideration for what is a very unselfish gift.
And Hugh Macdonald has learned enough about kidney donation in recent months to know that it's a relatively safe procedure, especially for the donor who is extremely well-vetted before being approved as a donor. But there's also the reality that, as he puts it, "it's very, very difficult to say to someone, 'Hey, I need a kidney.' You just can't do it."
Here at Virginia Mason Athletic Center, however, there are two people uniquely qualified to ask you to do it.