Missouri’s daughter, 25, shares an emotional TikTok video of her father learning she is his kidney donor
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A Missouri woman has risked her father’s wrath by becoming his kidney donor after keeping the secret for eight months while undergoing frequent dialysis.
Nurse Delayne Ivanowski, 25, was determined to give her father John, 60, a better quality of life after he was diagnosed with immunoglobulin A (IgA) deficiency, which caused his immune system to attack his kidneys. , more than once. years ago.
Deficiency means that a person has low or no levels of IgA, an antibody that is part of the immune system, in their blood, and this could lead to autoimmune problems, which can cause the immune system to activate your body, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.
John was diagnosed with IgA nephropathy, a kidney disease in which IgA accumulates in the organ. It can lead to kidney failure.
Nurse Delayne Ivanowski (left), 25, was determined to donate her kidney to her father, John (right), 60, to give him a better quality of life.
The emotional moment Delayne told her father she was his ‘anonymous’ kidney donor went viral. In the TikTok video, viewed by millions, she is seen breaking down in tears.
She saw him spend up to five hours a day, four days a week on kidney dialysis for more than a year, Delayne, who is from Kirkwood, which is outside St Louis, told the local news agency. KMOV4.
John had lost his son and Delayne’s only sibling to cancer 16 years ago, and was reluctant to have his daughter become his kidney donor.
“I thought, I lost my son and if something happened to Delayne, I don’t know what I would do,” she said. ABC Newsadding: “It was a big concern.”
But the 25-year-old was determined to give her kidney to her father, even without his approval, because it could have been years before he obtained a new organ if she didn’t offer her own.
“He likes to walk my dog and run with my dog and he wants to do all these things, but now he’s attached to a machine,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s the way anyone should have to live.”
Delayne added: “I was like, ‘I’m going to do it. I don’t care how mad he is at me. I don’t care if he kicks me out of the house or hates me or doesn’t say a word to me for the rest of my life.’
‘At least he will live a good life and not be attached to a machine.’
The video opens with the 25-year-old walking into her father’s hospital on an IV drip (left), and John is overcome with emotion (right) when he realizes what she had done for him.
The father and daughter talk to KMOV4 after his life-saving surgery.
So, in secret, he went through the months-long approval process to become a kidney donor to his father, which meant undergoing endless medical tests and receiving dozens of calls with social workers and medical personnel, all while living under the their parents’ roof.
In August, John finally got the call the family had been waiting for: a donor had been found for him.
“They called me at work and said, ‘We have an anonymous donor,’ and I almost dropped the phone and I was like, are you kidding me?” she told ABC News.
‘People can be in the [kidney waiting] list for five, six, seven, eight years and be on dialysis for so long, and I just couldn’t believe it.’
Delayne added: “I was like, ‘I’m going to do it. I don’t care how mad he is at me. I don’t care if he kicks me out of the house or hates me or doesn’t say a word for the rest of my life.’
So she secretly went through the months-long approval process to become her father’s kidney donor. Delayne is shown here at the hospital
The nurse shows his scar after surgery. Her father was resistant to her donating her kidney to him.
If she hadn’t donated her kidney, John could have been waiting years for a transplant.
John underwent his surgery at the University of Washington and the Barnes Jewish Transplant Center in St. Louis, with hospital staff working hard to keep Delayne’s secret.
Jason Wellen, who is the center’s pancreas-kidney transplant surgical director and John’s doctor, said staff had to do a lot of work “behind the scenes” to make sure the father and daughter stayed in separate pre-op areas. . and he had to make sure they didn’t see each other post-op to keep the secret until Delayne was ready to break the news to John.
And when he did, John began to cry.
Filming the emotional moment he walked into his father’s hospital room hooked up to an IV drip after surgery, John knew immediately what had happened without Delayne saying a word.
‘Oh Lord. Are you kidding me?’ he says in the video, which was posted to TikTok and has been viewed more than four million times.
John then looks at his wife in shock before being overcome with emotion and begins sobbing in his chair.
Delayne tries to calm him down by assuring him that he’s okay.
He recovers and says, ‘I knew you were up to something.’
“I’m always up to something,” is his cheeky reply.
In the text overlay on her video, Delayne wrote: “If 6,000 people sold me $1, it could cover the cost of a kidney transplant for my dad.”
Despite initially being “upset”, John said he was grateful for his daughter’s selfless act and it was a “huge relief” not to be “connected to the machine”.
“I can’t stop crying,” she added.
At the time of writing this report, just over 104,000 people are waiting for an organ transplant, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.