HOUSTON -- A Houston-area woman was denied a gift of life minutes away from transplant surgery because of a mistake, the Local 2 Troubleshooters reported in an exclusive story Thursday.

Eulalia Jean thought her prayers were answered when doctors said they had a kidney and she was at the top of the organ donation list. But that turned out to be wrong.

For four hours a day, three days a week, she sat in dialysis while the machines did the work for her failing kidneys.

"It drains me out. Well, I go to work in the morning. And then from work, I go straight over there," she said.

But one morning last month, a phone call broke her routine.

Methodist Hospital said a matching kidney had arrived. Jean said that the Methodist coordinator told her that she was next in line for the transplant.

"She asked my wife, 'How fast can you get here?'" husband Stanley Jean said. "I was very, very excited and happy. They started putting IVs in the hand right away, and giving her certain medications in the IV, preparing her for surgery."

Eulalia Jean expected her doctor to walk in any minute and wheel her away to better health. But more than 90 minutes after the scheduled surgery, her doctor came in with news she still does not understand.

"(He said,) 'Bad news. You're not getting it. Somebody else is getting it,'" Stanley Jean said. "They took the IV off of her and just said, 'Go home. You're ready to go.' Like no big deal."

Eulalia Jean said the Methodist doctor told her that it was a misunderstanding.

"Come to find out, she wasn't first on the list after all. They made a mistake," Stanley Jean said.

"What went wrong was that the kidney was damaged," said Sherrill Lanthier of Methodist Hospital.

Methodist said she was in line to receive one of the donor's kidneys. Another patient at Memorial Hermann Hospital would get the other.

"The kidney that was allocated to Mrs. Jean was damaged. There was another kidney that was used in another person that was higher up on the list than her," Lanthier said.

"If my name was in there at the top, now all of a sudden, it's in second. I don't know. I don't know how their system works," Eulalia Jean said.

"The answer for all of these people on the list is, 'You just have to trust us?'" Local 2's Amy Davis asked.

"The answer for all of the people on the list is we need more organ donors. That's the answer," Lanthier said.

But the Jeans still want to know why the Methodist doctor called her case a mix-up.

They are still waiting for the answer, while Eulalia returns to dialysis.

"All the nurses were asking me, 'What's wrong? You look like you're sad.' I said, 'Yeah, I didn't think I was going to be here anymore,'" she said.

A nationwide computer database pairs a donor with a recipient who is the best match, but the database is not public.

Methodist officials say Jean may be waiting as long as three years for a kidney because she has type "O" blood. There are currently more than 88,000 people waiting for organ transplants in the United States.

For more information on organ donation, visit www.organdonor.gov.