By Jacquielynn Floyd

KAUFMAN – Love is in the air today, in all its predictable guises: The painful burning-ring-of-fire variety; the showy, sugary chick-flick kind; the vaguely embarrassing I-got-you-this-at-Victoria's-Secret edition. It's a matter of personal preference.

Less obvious but more enduring in its satisfactions is sturdy, practical love – romance with a little less fire and sugar, but with a lot more glue. It's a kind of low-frequency, constant radio transmission between two people that says in a circular loop: "Whatever happens, I'm right here."

It surely underlaid Kaufman County Court-at-Law Judge Erleigh Norville Wiley's no-hesitation decision to donate a kidney to her husband, federal prosecutor Aaron Wiley.

Last Valentine's Day, doctors at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas replaced one of his very sick kidneys with one of her pink, robust, healthy ones. It gave him his life back.

Correction: It gave both of them their lives back, because I suspect neither was much interested in going on without the other.

"Her brothers say I'm really one of the family now!" Aaron said merrily, when we met in his wife's sunny courthouse office this week. It's a familiar joke he likes telling.

Aaron and Erleigh are the kind of people you take to on the spot: They're lively, talkative and funny.

Both can assume the uniform of courtroom formality, but (unlike some in the legal profession) they're comfortable without it. It doesn't take goggles to tell they're an excellent match.

The beginning was hardly auspicious. Erleigh, then a Dallas County prosecutor, was divorced and not really sure she wanted to date again when a friend persuaded her to call Aaron and invite him on a blind date to a basketball game.

Mustering her courage, she called and introduced herself. He cut her off abruptly: "We're not hiring at the U.S. attorney's office."

Once they cleared that up and met, Erleigh thought they just weren't on the same track. She lived out in the country with two young sons from her previous marriage. He was commitment-shy, just coming off a broken engagement, and living in a downtown condo.

"I was driving a big ol' mama-wagon, and he had a sports car," she says.

But as time passed, the differences seemed to retreat. They eased into the comfort of a steady relationship.

Then Aaron found out he was sick. Always fit and health-conscious, he was shocked when, after a routine screening, doctors said his kidneys were failing.

Exhausting chemical treatments didn't help. Finally, they outlined his cheerless choices: Begin permanent dialysis, or do nothing and die.

"The last word I heard was die," Aaron said, a hard piece of news for a man planning to marry.

"We went ahead and got married, but we never told the kids," Aaron said. "I didn't want them to worry about 'Is this guy going to be here or not be here?' "

Even when he was undergoing hours-long dialysis treatments three times a week, he soldiered on, working, commuting, being a stepfather.

He was weak, exhausted. After work, all he wanted to do was rest. Friends who spotted him on the street privately said that Aaron Wiley, barely into his 40s, shuffled like an old man.

Like most dialysis patients, he was on "the list" – the long waiting queue for organs from a donor who had recently died. He was aware that you can function just fine on one healthy kidney, but it had never really occurred to him to ask people he knew to be tested as possible "living" donors.

After a disastrous vacation in South Carolina, however, it occurred to Erleigh. When his dialysis port became blocked, Aaron landed in an unfamiliar, out-of-town hospital where doctors seemed unsure about how to treat him.

"On the plane going home, I'm thinking, 'We're not doing this any more. This is crazy,' " Erleigh said. "I said, 'We gotta get you a new kidney, and we gotta do it now.' "

Friends and relatives volunteered to be tested. But the best match they found, surprisingly, was Erleigh herself.

In fact, spouse-to-spouse "live" donations are fairly common, said Goran Klintmalm, chairman and chief of the Baylor Regional Transplant Institute.

"It's a matter of blood groups and types, and whether the spouse is healthy enough to give up a kidney," Klintmalm said. Dramatic improvements in immunosuppressant drugs, he said, have narrowed the rejection risks.

"It shouldn't change their lives at all," he said.

Except in the short run, of course. Surgery, messy and unromantic, is not most people's first choice for a festive Valentine's Day.

But that gory kidney, that slippery little bean-shaped organ, was the most romantic gift imaginable.

"I think it made me realize more than ever, you have kids; you have friends," Erleigh said.

"But your partner is the person who's always going to be with you."

*WFAA story link - http://www.wfaa.com/video/index.html?nvid=332182