There are moments when the microphone stops being a microphone. It stops being the place where we sell a record, introduce a morning-show bit, tease what is coming after the break or convince somebody to stay through another quarter-hour. Sometimes that microphone becomes exactly what I have always believed it was supposed to be: a way for one human being to reach another. After more than three decades in this business, I am asking the industry I love to let me borrow its microphone one more time, because I am running out of ways to explain just how desperately I need people to hear me.
My name is Steven Mills. Most people in radio have known me simply as Steve, or maybe even “Just Plain Steve.” I have spent much of my adult life in this business. I have programmed radio stations, sat behind microphones, managed talent, worked in corporate broadcasting, worried about ratings, fought for records, built digital strategies, coached personalities and watched this industry accomplish extraordinary things when it decides that somebody in its community needs help. Today, I am also a pastor, a husband, the daddy of a 13-year-old daughter, a two-time cancer survivor and a man living in complete renal failure. Dialysis is doing the work my kidneys can no longer do while my family and I desperately search for the living kidney donor who could help save my life.
Now there is another number attached to my name, and I need everybody reading this to understand it.
My cPRA is 99.9999%.
Read that again.
99.9999%.
cPRA stands for calculated panel-reactive antibody. In kidney transplantation, it is a measurement used to estimate the percentage of a donor population with whom a transplant candidate may be immunologically incompatible because of antibodies already present in that candidate’s body. The higher the cPRA, the more difficult it can be to find a compatible donor.
Mine is 99.9999%.
I want to be responsible with that number because my story does not need exaggeration. A cPRA of 99.9999% does not literally mean I have a one-in-a-million chance of finding a kidney. It does not mean there is nobody who can donate to me, and it certainly does not mean we stop searching. What it does mean is that I am extraordinarily highly sensitized, and finding a kidney my immune system can safely accept is extraordinarily difficult.
For some people, 99.9999% might sound like a reason to surrender.
For me, it is a reason to make the search bigger.
It means I need more people to see this. It means I need more communities talking about it. It means I need more television stations, radio stations, podcasts, creators, churches, celebrities, journalists and ordinary people carrying this story into places I cannot possibly reach myself. Somewhere in all of that reach could be the person we have been praying to find.
I have thought about Robin Roberts often during this journey. Robin survived breast cancer and later faced myelodysplastic syndrome, a serious disease of the blood and bone marrow. She needed a bone-marrow transplant, and her sister, Sally-Ann Roberts, turned out to be an extraordinarily good match. Her sister gave her something no television network, ratings book, paycheck or celebrity connection could give her: cells from her own body that helped give Robin another chance at life.
Robin then did something I will always respect as a broadcaster. She used the microphone.
She allowed America into an incredibly vulnerable chapter of her life, and in doing so she helped educate people about transplantation, donor registries and the extraordinary power of one human being deciding to help another. She showed what broadcasting can look like when the enormous machinery of media stops simply chasing attention and uses that attention to accomplish something meaningful.
Robin had Sally-Ann.
I am still searching for my one.
That is why I have knocked on almost every door I know how to knock on. I have reached out to Good Morning America. I have reached out to people connected to ABC, CBS and NBC. I have reached out to People Magazine. I have even gone as far to reach out to GoFUndME for a spotlight……over 150 times and they have never responded one time. I have contacted celebrities, creators, television personalities, radio people, executives, producers and journalists. I have reached out to people who have called me a friend over the years, people whose careers I have supported, people I have promoted, people I have interviewed, people I have programmed, people I have encouraged and people I have stood beside during my years in broadcasting.
The response has been encouraging in places. Some people have prayed. Some have shared. Some have made calls. Some have opened doors. Some have quietly begun working behind the scenes. Complete strangers have shown me a level of kindness that I will never forget for as long as God allows me to remain here.
And yes, some doors have remained painfully silent.
I am not writing that to shame anybody. I am writing it because silence cannot be where this story ends.
There are still people with enormous audiences who have not shared this story. There are still radio stations that have not talked about it. There are still morning shows that have never mentioned my name. There are still television producers who have never seen the video. There are still creators who could put this search in front of another million people with one button. There are still people I have known for decades who may simply not understand how urgent this has become.
Somewhere among all the people who have not seen me yet could be my one.
And that brings me directly to the industry I have loved for most of my life.
Radio, we spend an awful lot of time talking about reach.
What an interesting word that has become to me.
We calculate reach. We sell reach. We put reach into presentations. We combine reach with frequency. We show advertisers how many human beings our signals, streams, podcasts and social accounts can touch. We build entire business plans around the value of reaching another person.
Today, I am asking us to remember what that word meant before it became a metric.
Reach somebody.
Radio was never supposed to be merely transmitters, towers, playlists, sweepers, ratings, revenue and quarterly reports. At its very best, radio is people. It is the person sitting alone in a car who suddenly does not feel alone because somebody on the other side of the speakers understands. It is the community that raises money when a neighbor’s house burns down. It is the morning show that makes Christmas happen for a family that thought there would not be one. It is the station that stays on the air when the storm comes through. It is the personality who says, “One of ours needs us,” and an audience that answers, “Then what are we going to do about it?”
We are in the business of helping people.
Maybe somewhere along the way, amid consolidation, ratings pressure, declining budgets, algorithms, dashboards, revenue goals and everything else that has consumed modern broadcasting, we occasionally forgot that.
But helping people is still what this incredible medium was built to do.
So let’s do it.
Today, the person asking for help happens to be one of our own.
It happens to be me.
Something extraordinary has already happened because people decided to see me. Joshua Liljenquist heard about a pastor in a small Kansas town who desperately needed a kidney. He came to Garden City. He sat with me. He listened. He filmed my story. And then he used his reach to carry that story into places I never could have reached alone.
Millions of people saw it.
Thousands responded.
People I will probably never meet donated money. They prayed. They shared. They wrote messages. They told friends. They reminded me that there is still extraordinary goodness in this world.
KAKE News told the story. Esther Dillard told the story and helped explain the complicated reality of HLA sensitization. Radio stepped into the fight. Other journalists and broadcasters picked it up. People across the country began saying my name and sharing my face.
The GoFundMe created to help sustain me through this journey has now raised more than $68,000.
I do not have words large enough to explain what that means to me.
But there is one sentence I desperately wish I could write in the paragraph immediately following that one.
We found the kidney.
We haven’t.
I am still doing dialysis.
I am still waiting.
I am still searching.
I am still praying.
And now I know that my cPRA is 99.9999%.
That is why I need everybody who helped make the first wave happen to understand that this story is not finished.
I also need to say something else plainly, because there should be no embarrassment in telling the truth about what serious illness does to a family.
I still need financial help.
The kidney is the lifesaving medical need. Finding that compatible donor is the mission around which everything else revolves. But sustaining my life financially while we conduct that search is also incredibly important. Kidney failure does not suspend rent. Dialysis does not eliminate transportation expenses. Illness does not stop groceries, utilities, medical costs, supplies or the endless ordinary expenses involved in keeping a household functioning while somebody inside that household is fighting to stay alive.
So yes, I am asking you to help me find a kidney.
And I am also asking those who are able to continue supporting the GoFundMe.
Those are not competing needs. They are two parts of the same fight.
I need the kidney that can help save my life, and I need the financial stability that helps sustain that life while we keep searching for it.
So here is my ask, and I am asking bigger than I have ever asked before.
If you own radio stations, send this story to every one of them. If you program a station, put me on the air. If you host a morning show, talk about this. If you syndicate programming, give this search sixty seconds. If you run a television newsroom, send this to the assignment desk. If you are a journalist, call me. If you are a celebrity, put this in front of your audience. If you are a creator, use your reach. If you are a pastor, tell your congregation. If you have 100 followers, share it with 100 people. If you have 10 million followers, share it with 10 million people.
And if you are reading this thinking somebody with a bigger platform will take care of it, I need you to understand something that has become painfully clear to me:
You may be the bridge to the person I am looking for.
Share this article on Facebook.
Put it on Threads.
Put it on Instagram.
Send it through Messenger.
Put it on TikTok.
Email it.
Text it.
Send it to the church group.
Send it to the newsroom.
Send it to the morning show.
Send it to the celebrity you know.
Send it to the person who knows somebody who knows somebody.
Make this story impossible to miss.
Because this is no longer about whether an article gets clicks. It is not about whether a video gets another million views. It is not about whether a post performs well in an algorithm.
This is about whether all of that reach can eventually reach one human being.
The right human being.
My one.
There is a question that has followed me throughout this entire journey.
Do you see me?
Not Steven Mills the broadcaster.
Not Steven Mills the pastor.
Not Steven Mills the content somebody scrolled past while waiting for the next funny video.
Me.
A daddy who desperately wants to watch his daughter graduate. A husband who wants more ordinary mornings. A pastor who believes there are sermons still left inside him. A broadcaster who still believes this industry can change lives when we remember why we were given these microphones in the first place. A man who survived cancer twice and is now asking for another chance to survive.
My cPRA is 99.9999%.
Medicine tells me that makes this search extraordinarily difficult.
My faith tells me to keep searching anyway.
So I will.
I will keep knocking.
I will keep asking.
I will keep praying.
I will keep believing.
And I will keep asking people to share this story until the person we are searching for finally sees it.
Please do not simply like this article.
Share it.
Please do not simply tell me you are praying.
Pray—and share it.
Please do not assume your platform is too small.
Use it.
Please do not assume somebody else will do it.
Do it yourself.
Put my name everywhere. Put this story everywhere. Put the donor information everywhere. Put the fundraiser everywhere. Make enough noise that this story reaches places none of us could have predicted.
I have spent a lifetime behind microphones trying to reach people.
Today, I am standing on the other side of that microphone asking the people I have spent my life serving:
Will you reach back?
My name is Steven Mills.
My cPRA is 99.9999%.
I need a kidney.
I need financial help sustaining my life while we search for that kidney.
And I need you to help this story travel farther than it has ever traveled before.
Somewhere out there, I still believe my one exists.
Do you see me?
If you do, please help somebody else see me too.
Help me find my one.
Watch Steven’s story on KAKE News:
https://archive.joshliljenquist.com/media/watch/kake-news-josh-liljenquist-garden-city-kidney-donor/
Read Esther Dillard’s “Race for a Kidney: A Pastor’s Fight to Live”:
https://estherdillard.com/race-for-a-kidney-pastor-steven-mills/
See Joshua Liljenquist’s page documenting Steven’s living kidney donor search:
https://joshliljenquist.com/impact-steven-mills-kidney-donor-search
Could you be Steven’s living kidney donor?
HCA Midwest Health Living Donor Program
Patient: Steven Mills
DOB: 12/23/1977
Help sustain Steven through the search:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-pastor-steven-fight-for-his-life-p74hx
Do you see me? Help me find my one.
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