At a family gathering decades ago, Sue Bierbaum’s husband’s uncle, a doctor, offered to check everyone’s blood pressure. It had started because grandma was struggling with some health issues.

When it was Bierbaum’s turn, the doctor wrapped the cuff around her arm and dismissed the first reading. He rechecked it several times.

“You really need to go to the hospital right now,” he told Bierbaum, then 26 and a first-grade teacher. “I’m not kidding.”

She said she felt perfectly fine. She laughed, “Uncle Val, you’re teasing me.”

“No, this is really serious,” he said. Her systolic blood pressure number was over 200. Anything over 140 is considered high.

She made an appointment a few weeks later and found out her kidneys were failing due to a filtering disease the doctors discovered. The worst part was that she and her husband at the time had just decided to try to start a family. Doctors told her it could be fatal for her or the baby if she got pregnant. A few months later, she found herself staring at a paper authorizing an operation that would sterilize her.

“I didn’t want to do it,” she said. “It was the hardest day of my life.”

More than anything, she had wanted to become a mother. She and her husband applied to adopt through Catholic Charities. She says they rejected her with a letter explaining that they had many parents who wanted to adopt who were healthy candidates. The couple appealed and sent letters from Bierbaum’s doctor, to no avail.

“That was another door closed,” she said. A lifelong Catholic, she still won’t donate there.

During a visit to her husband’s cousin in Texas, she learned about private adoptions. Their relatives offered to help with the legal process and their personal connections. In the spring of 1985, the lawyers started looking for a pregnant woman interested in having her baby adopted. Months of waiting and praying and hoping began.

On Nov. 13, a relative from Texas called Bierbaum’s elementary school. A woman working with her lawyers had delivered her baby. It was a boy, and they could come take him home. A school official announced it over the PA, and Bierbaum ran down the halls screaming with excitement. She and her husband flew down to Houston and picked up 2-day-old Ben. It was the happiest day of her life.

However, by then, she was 30 and her kidneys were nearing shutdown. In need of a transplant, her sister turned out to be a perfect match, and the operation was successful.

A few years later, when Ben was 3, Bierbaum and her husband separated; she raised him as a single parent until she remarried when he was 14. Now, after 28 years of teaching first-graders and then seven years of teaching future educators at St. Louis Community College in Wildwood, Missouri, she’s finally retired. But her kidney won’t last much longer.

A kidney from a live donor typically lasts between 10 to 15 years. Bierbaum is celebrating 32 years with her sister’s. “I’ve officially had it longer than her,” she jokes.

She’s facing dialysis and possibly years on a transplant list unless she can find another donor.

Her son, Ben Strake, now 33, had an idea. An investor in two Byrd & Barrel restaurant locations in the St. Louis area, he decided to launch an organ donation campaign. He’s created an online platform, match.mom, where potential donors can find out more information about organ donation and his mother’s story. Anyone who gets tested as a possible match in the month of April will be entered to win free fried chicken at Byrd & Barrel for life. He’s partnered with the St. Louis Blues, who play in the Enterprise Center, which has a Byrd & Barrel food spot. The Blues will announce the campaign during Monday night’s game.

He’s also getting tested himself and is willing to join a donor chain to increase his mom’s odds of finding a match. In that scenario, he would donate his kidney to a stranger in order for his mom to receive a kidney from a bigger pool of potential donors.

A few years ago, Strake connected with his birth mother and family. While they were warm and welcoming, he said the experience made him realize more than ever the opportunities and life his mom had given him when he was adopted.

“I feel like this person has given me everything,” he said, gesturing toward his mom, sitting next to him. “I need to do everything I can to try to extend that.”

He teared up, and his mom put her arm around him and kissed him.

“How am I ever going to repay you?” she has asked him.

“Live another 25 years, and we’ll call it square,” he said.

Holly Connor sang her big solo in her middle school’s production of “Newsies” this month. She played a big-voiced saloon singer, Medda Larkin, and when she bellowed the chorus to “That’s Rich,” the audience at Wydown Middle School in Clayton, Missouri noticed.

Her 14-year-old voice sounds like that of someone much older. She’s got range. There’s a polished timbre and control to it.

“Everyone was blown away by my voice,” Holly said to me, matter-of-factly. She isn’t being cocky. “I can hear everything because I can’t see everything,” she explains. Holly was born blind because her optic nerve never fully developed. Although she can make out some movement and contrast several feet ahead of her, she relies on Braille to read and write.

She’s also autistic, which can make performing onstage a lot trickier. It has taken time for her to adjust to the chaos and sensory overload that can be part of a stage production. But these challenges haven’t stopped her from participating in 12 shows last year. She’s performed in 21 different productions with various theater companies around St. Louis over the past three years. That’s on top of a full school day, playing piano in the school’s jazz band, and taking private acting, dancing and singing lessons. Her days start early and are jam-packed with rehearsals, auditions and lessons until evening.

It’s quite a departure from a baby who cried constantly and a toddler who couldn’t leave her house until she was 3 years old. Her parents didn't take her to public places until she was 7 because she would get overwhelmed.

Holly has a rare triad of blindness, autism and musical genius. The phenomenon has been written about in medical and anecdotal accounts. Her parents and voice coach describe her as a savant, who can play and sing songs by ear that she’s heard once and has an instant memory for music. She picks up new instruments and languages easily. She has also started composing her own music.

Her mother, Katie Sears, gave up her career running clinical trials for cancer research two years ago to manage her daughter’s activities and needs. She has spent hours converting scripts into Braille for her daughter, which sit in fat, bound copies on her bedroom bookshelf. She keeps an airtight schedule and packed calendar.

“Her goal is to be on Broadway,” Katie said. Just as important, music and performance have opened up a world of friendships to Holly that she had never experienced before. Her mother started an Instagram account a year ago and posted daily videos in which she documented Holly’s days. It gave students at school a way to get to know her and feel comfortable talking to her.

Her stepfather, Titus Sears, relocated their family from Seattle for a job with Enterprise. The St. Louis region has embraced Holly with her special needs and gifts in a way the family never experienced before, her parents said.

“We are making as many open doors as possible for her,” he said.

When Holly was 4 years old, her parents took her to China for a seven-week experimental stem cell treatment that cost $75,000. Since then, Holly has gone to Panama for a similar stem cell therapy and will be returning again next year for a week. Her mother says she has seen a significant reduction in her daughter’s autism symptoms and improvement in her sight, although the treatment has not been scientifically proven to work.

Her mother stays backstage with her for every production. There have been times when she has had to calm Holly down 30 seconds before she has to go on stage. Once she even fell off the stage because she didn't have a buddy to guide her. To watch from the audience, though, it’s hard to tell that this young performer is any different from her peers.

That is, until you hear that exceptional voice.

*

*

*

Remember when rich parents had the integrity to donate buckets of cash to fancy universities so their mediocre kids could get a coveted spot?

Say what you want about Jared Kushner’s convicted felon father, Charles. At least he had enough scruples to write his $2.5 million check directly to Harvard University. He didn’t try to pass off Jared as a water polo champ.

Everyone knew what was up in that exchange. Daddy Kushner knew he was putting a down-payment on a diploma. Harvard knew, and as evidenced by more recent emails, they like how this game has long been played. And Jared knew.

Which brings us to what may be the most surprising thing in this college cheating scandal. Most of the beneficiaries of the busted rich parents allegedly had no idea they got a hefty assist getting into Yale or Stanford. Some of them actually believed their SAT scores magically rose 400 points or they jumped from a 17 ACT to a 35. There’s a telling exchange in the 200-plus-page affidavit detailing the investigation’s findings. “Cooperating Witness 1” is explaining how the cheating scheme works to a parent and says the student won’t have any idea they didn’t earn the inflated score.

“Which is great, that’s the way you want it. They feel good about themselves,” he said.

Well, there’s a millennial twist to a cheating scandal. You can protect your kid’s self-esteem as you bribe and cheat their way into college. Some of these students might have had a clue that they weren’t among the brightest and best in their exclusive high schools. But being surrounded by wealth has a way of making you feel like you’ve “earned” whatever you get.

The Privileged Action group tends to get really worked up about the Affirmative Action group. They don’t seem to get as upset about legacy kids, for whom simply being related to another person gets them bonus points. They also don’t get as upset about the spots reserved for athletes in sports dominated by white participants that require big money to play. It doesn’t even rankle the middle class that Early Decision students, whose families typically don’t have to worry about financial aid packages, have a far greater chance of acceptance than those who apply later in order to have competing financial aid offers. During the recent trial of Harvard’s admission system, one witness noted that early decision legacies get a 40-percentage-point boost in the chance of admission, compared with a 9-point boost for low-income students, according to the school’s own analysis.

Where’s the clamoring to get rid of legacy bonus points? For whatever reason, giving an unearned advantage to the children of rich families doesn’t provoke the same angst in America that Affirmative Action has.

The children who grow up in bubbles of privilege often don’t have anyone of authority in their lives to give them a reality check about how much of their “success” is a reflection of things they never earned in the first place. The schools they attend from preschool and the selective universities they end up in reinforce this message: You are special. Your hard work got you here. You are destined to do great things.

Imagine if during orientation, selective colleges and universities shared some perspective-setting data about how their school is overrepresented by those from the wealthiest families. Imagine if they showed how that wealth made the path to this college all that much easier for them. It’s hard to deliver that message to kids whose families also may be writing hefty tuition checks. But if higher education institutions were more honest and transparent about who gets in and why, perhaps these students would graduate with more realistic ideas about what their degrees mean. Colleges and universities should expose the limits of the supposed meritocracy their students believe they rode in on. Maybe they will become parents less inclined to game the system for their own kids.

It’s hard to teach integrity by the time students get to college. But you can still impart some humility.

*

*

*