Huntington Beach man already has a big heart. Now, he needs a kidney.
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Shawn Kortes is always the helper, and never the one asking for assistance.
The Huntington Beach resident and his wife Jenny created the HB Quarantine Cuisine Facebook group during the coronavirus pandemic, an attempt to aid restaurant owners hamstrung by stay-at-home orders and dining restrictions.
More recently, Kortes made several trips north in the aftermath of the Los Angeles area fires, delivering truckloads of food donated by local restaurants, along with other goods to be distributed during refugee efforts.
“It’s the littlest things,” said family friend Courtney Winford, an assistant principal at Huntington Beach High School. “He’s always there to help. I mean, he’s helped me move I don’t know how many times. He’s that guy you can always count on.”
Now, Shawn Kortes is the one reaching out and asking for help.
He has no choice. The 45-year-old knows it could literally be a matter of life or death.
Kortes, who has polycystic kidney disease, is searching for a living kidney donor.
He was first diagnosed with the hereditary disease back in 2010. He saw the effect it had on his mother, Cindy, who passed away in 2020.
Things are getting more real for Kortes. He started peritoneal dialysis in January, an eight-hour process that he undergoes every night at home.
In four two-hour cycles, a special solution is used to filter the blood inside his body. He compares it to an oil change for a car. But the equipment is bulky, making any travel plans difficult.
“The longer I’m on dialysis, the sicker I’ll get, and that’s where you start getting a lot of other complications,” Kortes said. “The idea is to get people to test to see if they can be a donor. The less time I’m on dialysis, the better. I’m still young, I have kids, I’m still healthy.”
Kortes, who works as a manager and server at 25 Degrees bar in downtown Huntington Beach, wants to be able to provide for Jenny and their 6-year-old daughter Charli, who doesn’t quite understand yet what Daddy is going through. He also has a 17-year-old stepson, Logan Gray, a junior who plays for the Huntington Beach High football team.
Shawn Kortes was recently put on a National Kidney Foundation wait list, but that’s only for cadaver organs and the wait can be years. That’s time that Kortes is not sure he has.
His blood type is O-negative, which means he can only receive a kidney donation from another person with O-type blood.
Shawn first met his wife in high school — he went to Huntington Beach, she went to Marina — and they reconnected some two decades later. They’ve gone through the ups and downs together after getting married in 2018.
Jenny, who works as a personal trainer, saw her mother die in March 2019, just a few months after Charli was born. She had already lost her father when she was a senior at Marina.
Then, Cindy’s death created a bigger void.
“It’s just been like one thing after another for them,” Winford said. “Shawn’s the first person to help out anybody in need, myself included. They’re just such positive people, giving people and loving people. They’re definitely ones that don’t deserve to be going through this, and I hate saying that, because no one deserves it. But they definitely don’t deserve it, you know?”
Shawn transitioned from working in the oil and gas industry to helping out restaurants, finding himself with plenty of time during the pandemic after he got furloughed and laid off. He would go to different restaurants in town, come home and write positive reviews.
HB Quarantine Cuisine has kept the name and remains an active Facebook group, currently with slightly less than 13,000 members.
“It worked pretty well, I think,” Shawn Kortes said. “We got a lot of feedback from a lot of business owners saying ‘Thanks for helping us keep the doors open, keep the employees paid.’ At the same time, it was pretty fun. We were all sitting around looking for something to do. The whole world was shut down, and I got to go eat food and write stories, have some fun in the process. I got to meet a lot of really cool people and made a lot of new friends throughout Huntington Beach.”
Some people talk about the “aloha spirit” in Huntington Beach, and the Kortes family seems to possess it. Jenny’s brother even lives in Maui, with another setback for the family happening as he lost nearly everything in the 2023 wildfires there.
The water is no longer friendly for Shawn, who can’t go in the ocean anymore after a catheter was put into his gut on Jan. 2 for the dialysis. It took about six months of testing through UC Irvine to have his name put on the National Kidney Foundation list.
“I can totally see it occasionally on Shawn’s face, on the bad days,” said Damion Loukas, another close family friend. “It’s like, man, this just really, really sucks. But Shawn being Shawn, he’s head down, feet moving forward and trying to keep the best outlook possible. I think he definitely dives head-first into the community, into his friends, into his family. He’s trying to soak up as much time as he can, while he can.”
There’s a voucher program, Shawn Kortes said, which offers more hope to his situation.
“Say [an interested donor’s] kidney isn’t a direct match for me, but they’re still willing to donate,” he said. “They can donate to somebody else on my behalf, and I get a voucher which kind of bumps you up and gives you a front-of-the-line pass. With a voucher, I can get a kidney within like six months.”
Jenny said his spirits have improved lately, even with the difficult dialysis.
“I think he saw hope with the fact of being on the list, and finally being able to tell more people about his story,” she said. “I think it’s making him more comfortable.”
Shawn, of course, immediately disagreed, again thinking of his significant other before himself.
“Not really,” he said, looking her way. “You’re going to have to deal with it for the rest of your life.”
Jenny was quick with her own answer.
“I know,” she simply replied. “I’m still here.”
So is Shawn, hoping a friend or even a stranger can make a decision that will lead to a match that prolongs his life.
“It’s hard for me, because I never wanted this to be part of my story,” he said. “If I die one day, I want people to talk about all of the things I did in the community, the things I did to help people, that kind of stuff. I never want people to talk about how I got sick, a ‘poor Shawn’ kind of thing.”
He has to keep looking to the future. Many people don’t show symptoms of polycystic kidney disease until they turn 30, and it’s still years until Charli becomes an adult and can be tested for it.
Those are years Shawn wants to be there, to see her do things like learn how to drive and graduate from high school.
He now knows that it’s OK if it takes help to get there.
“He’s still smiling,” Winford said. “We were just there on Sunday for dinner, and he’s still Shawn. I think for him, it’s about the bigger picture of donating and how to help more people than just him. That’s who he is.”
To find out more about Shawn Kortes’ story, kidney donation or be tested as a potential donor, visit his website at nkr.org/RJV252.
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