A Saskatoon woman who advertised for a kidney donation has received one from a stranger in the same city. Although the surgery has yet to be performed, Debbie Onishenko believes the donation will save her life.
She said she has needed a new kidney for years.
“I’ve been a diabetic my whole life, and diabetes gets all your organs eventually. It got my heart first, and I had bypass surgery many years ago. Then my kidneys started to go,” Onishenko said in an interview.
“I’ve had kidney disease for quite a long time, probably 15 to 20 years now, but it was very slow progress and I just kept trying to keep myself as healthy as possible and stable as possible. But it’s gotten down to about 9 percent [kidney function] left.”
Onishenko couldn’t find a suitable match in her family, so she decided to advertise.
“I had seen way back that this guy in Ontario had put an ad on his car. And I said, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool.’ He got a kidney doing that. When I started to feel like I needed one, it just seemed to be the right time to do that,” she said.
“My husband said, ‘Well, just driving around won’t do enough.’ And so he started calling the TV stations to do a story on it, and that’s how it went out there.”
Brent Kruger, an employee of Teen Challenge, felt compelled to respond.
“The reason I decided to donate is because I can live a perfectly healthy full life with just one kidney,” Kruger told The Epoch Times.
“When I heard that Debbie had been on the transplant list for five years, I knew I had to try and donate to her. Yes, she’s a stranger, but she deserves a long, beautiful, healthy life, and if I’m able to help her achieve that, I had better do that.”
How it Happened
Kruger learned about Onishenko’s need in a news report online last August. The article included a photo of the ad on the rear windshield that included her blood type, phone number, and request, “Share your spare.”“I immediately knew I had to phone the number to get more info. It was so clear to me that I had to at least try. So I phoned the number the next day,” Kruger said in a Facebook post.
He said he contacted the kidney donation department at St. Paul’s Hospital and followed its instructions, including recording his blood pressure for three days in a row.
“I spent a month cutting out all non naturally occurring sugars, worked out three times a week and cut my portions in half and I lost ten pounds and passed the glucose tolerance test.
“I had a chest X-ray, an ultrasound, a CT scan and a nuclear medicine kidney scan that tested my overall kidney function. Passed them all.”
Kruger met Onishenko in person only recently, having talked with her previously only by phone or on Facebook.
“Two Mondays ago we met for the first time as we both got our cross-match testing done,” he said.
After waiting for a week and a half, Kruger found out he was a match and shared the good news with Onishenko.
“I give her a video call. I read her a poem...’Roses are red violets are [blue], I have a kidney that I’m giving to you.’ ?”
Onishenko recalls her reaction.
“I was like, this is fantastic, but are you sure? This isn’t just giving blood or something. This is a huge deal. And he said ‘Yes.’”
Onoshenko is looking forward to the surgery, though the date has not been set.
“This will give me my life back. Kidneys take all the toxins out of your body, and it will just make me feel like a million bucks. It will let me continue living, because if my kidneys kept going the way they were going, that wouldn’t be very long,” she said.
Kruger told The Epoch Times he hopes to inspire others.
“If a person is healthy before donating and maintains a healthy lifestyle after donating, they can help change a life,” he said.
“You can help a child, you can help a mom and a dad, you can help a grandma or grandpa spend quality time with their grandchildren. You’re giving a person their life back.”
