🙏 Supporting The Down Family 🙏

If you’re here, it means you’ve taken the time to care about our family, and we’re grateful for that.

My brother Josh Down was 28 years young when he was diagnosed with Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC), a rare disease that slowly scars the bile ducts and damages the liver. It is a brutal illness that brings pain, exhaustion, infections, and complications that slowly wear a body down. For years he has carried it quietly through doctor visits, setbacks, stretches where things seemed stable, and the understanding that one day it would lead to transplant.

After nearly a decade of living with PSC, that moment has finally arrived.

Josh is now preparing for a liver transplant at the University of Michigan on March 24, 2026.

For years he has done his best to live around this disease rather than inside it. Outside of hospitals and diagnoses, his world looks like the life most people are working toward. Josh and his beautiful wife Sara have spent the last seventeen years raising their two amazing kids, Emmalin and Ethan, in the middle of the usual family rhythm. School mornings, sports schedules, video games, dinners together, and the thousand small moments that quietly become the best parts of life.

For the past ten years Josh has worked as an avionics technician, a job that requires patience, precision, and solving problems most people never see until something stops working. If you know him, that choice of work makes perfect sense. Josh has always been someone who quietly figures things out.

But PSC is not the kind of problem anyone can solve alone.

A liver transplant offers hope, but it also begins a long stretch of recovery. There will be months of medications, constant monitoring, travel for follow up care in Ann Arbor, and time away from work while Josh’s body heals and adjusts to a new liver.

During that time Sara will be stepping away from work to care for Josh as he recovers. Like many families facing a serious medical event, the responsibilities of everyday life continue even while everything else stops. Bills, travel, medications, and time away from work all arrive at once during a moment when a family is already carrying more than usual.

That is why this page exists.

Many people have asked how they can help Josh and his family through this chapter. Support here helps carry the real weight that comes with transplant and recovery. Medical expenses not covered by insurance, travel to and from the University of Michigan for care, medications, and the time Josh will need to step away from work while he heals.

Sometimes people think small contributions do not make a difference. The truth is the opposite.

One dollar at a time, one share at a time, one person at a time, those small acts build the bridge that carries a family back toward normal life.

Another way people sometimes help is by learning about living liver donation. The liver is one of the few organs that can regenerate. A healthy donor can donate a portion of their liver, and both donor and recipient are able to recover with healthy liver function.

Anyone interested in learning more about living donation can contact the University of Michigan Transplant Center directly:

University of Michigan Transplant Center

(734) 936-7491

https://www.uofmhealth.org/conditions-treatments/transplant

Even sharing Josh’s story helps more than most people realize. Transplant journeys often move through communities. Friends, coworkers, neighbors, and sometimes strangers who simply decide to show up when a family needs them.

Our family is deeply grateful to everyone who has reached out, shared encouragement, or kept Josh in their thoughts as March 24 approaches.

Josh has spent years doing his best to protect the ordinary life he built with his family. This surgery offers the chance for more of it.

Thank you for being part of that.

The Down Family