Kidney donor answers Toronto mom’s prayers
Stranger from Hamilton saw desperate Facebook post and ended up being a match
HAMILTON— Jennen Johnson has met an “angel” on earth — and she’s a stranger from Hamilton.
In two weeks, the 42-year-old Toronto mother will receive a life-saving kidney transplant.
The organ comes from Christi Nolan, a woman she would never have met if not for a desperate Facebook post.
“She’s a selfless person and she doesn’t feel like she’s doing anything extraordinary,” Johnson said. “She’s such a humble human being.”
The Spectator first wrote about the pair in January when Nolan, 37, was being tested as a potential match.
A few weeks after that story was published, doctors told Johnson she had positively found a kidney donor. And it was Nolan.
“I started to pray. And I started to cry,” Johnson said. “I felt like our prayers had been answered. It was a (mixed) bag of emotions.”
Johnson had been given four years to live. The kidney donor wait list, which has about 600 people on it, is about eight years.
Nolan, a self-employed yoga instructor who has spent time in Africa and Haiti doing humanitarian work, appears unfazed by the scope of her good deed.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” she said. “I don’t feel like I deserve all the praise.”
Nolan, who has nine brothers and sisters, may come to understand how grateful Johnson and her relatives are when the two families meet next weekend for the first time.
“They want to see Christi. They want to hug her, hold her and spin her around,” Johnson said — especially Tatianna, her 12-year-old daughter, who helps her connect the tubes on her dialysis machine at home.
The surgery is scheduled for March 27. Nolan goes first, in a nearly four-hour operation. Doctors will make two or three small incisions for a camera and a bigger one to remove her left kidney.
She’ll then be wheeled out of the operating room. It will be sterilized and Johnson will be brought in. Her surgery is about two hours. Doctors will leave the dying kidney inside Johnson’s body and connect the new one.
She’s looking at about two months’ recovery time before she can return to work as an executive assistant at Price- waterhouseCoopers.
“We started off as strangers, but once this is over we will be connected in such a unique way,” Nolan said.
“People keep asking me if I’m scared or nervous. But I’m not. I just want her to get the kidney and start her healing process.”
There are a number of risks Nolan faces, including being put out by anesthetic. Her wounds will take time to heal and she could develop high blood pressure. Doctors will have to monitor her existing kidney in the weeks following the transplant.
In the worst-case scenario, could she die? “I’m in good hands,” Nolan said. “If I was going to make a list of all my concerns, dying would be at the bottom.”
In fact, she’s more afraid of the catheter. But her real concern is that the kidney will be rejected by Johnson’s body.
“I have no choice but to feel hope,” Johnson said.
The women have each been videoblogging about the experience on YouTube and answering questions from the public.
Nolan wasn’t paid for her kidney. The only compensation she will get is through a hospital program that covers some mileage and parking expenses.
A common theme for each of them is appealing to the public for more living donors to come forward.
Johnson shared her agony in trying to find a donor. The search took her through countless family members and co-workers. Even broaching the question was tough. “How was your weekend? Oh and can I have an organ?’ ” Johnson joked. “How do you word that?” So she took her mother’s advice and put an ad in a Toronto newspaper, which was then posted to social media.
“I’m so thankful she was on Facebook that fateful day,” Johnson says of Nolan.
She’s encouraging members of the public to consider becoming living donors.
“Don’t be afraid of the process. Please do it,” she said.
“You will literally be saving someone’s life.”
“We started off as strangers, but once this is over we will be connected in such a unique way.” CHRISTI NOLAN KIDNEY DONOR