John Ivanowski, 60, was diagnosed two years ago with a kidney disease that required him to undergo dialysis for four to five hours a day, four times a week.
"He's hooked up to a machine," said Delayne Ivanowski, his 25-year-old daughter, "I don't think anyone has to live that way."
The medical solution was to receive a transplant, but in the United States there are more than 100,000 people on the waiting list.
"The only way to do it in a few months is to come in with a living donor," Dr. Jason Wellen, director of kidney and pancreas transplants at Barnes-Jewish Washington University Medical Center, told ABC News.
Delayne Ivanowski offered her father to be her donor.
He "flat out" refused.
Fifteen years earlier, John Ivanowski had lost his son Dawson to cancer.
"She's the only thing I have," the man justified his refusal, according to CBS News.
But her daughter did not give up: "I'm going to do it, I don't care how angry she gets with me, I don't care if she throws me out of the house or hates me or doesn't speak to me again for the rest of my life," she says she said to herself. herself, "at least she will live a good life.
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A call that changed his life
The young woman, who lives with her parents in Kirkwood, a suburb of St. Louis (Missouri), secretly underwent the process for months to be approved as a donor, behind the backs of her father and mother despite living in the same home and despite often doing it in the same clinic where he received treatment.
His father finally received a life-changing call from the transplant center last August: “They called me at work and said, 'We have an anonymous donor.'
On February 16, the day the transplant was performed, the doctors at the Washington University & Barnes-Jewish center took special care so that the man did not see his daughter.
The operation was a success.
After undergoing surgery in adjoining operating rooms, the father and daughter recovered in rooms just a few feet apart on the same floor of the hospital.
The man finally learned the truth one day after surgery, when she entered his room dressed in a hospital gown.
“I knew instantly,” he said, “I was in shock, I looked at my wife and said, 'Are you kidding?'
His daughter recorded it in a video that has gone viral on the TikTok social network, with hundreds of thousands of views.
His father will have to take medication for the rest of his life so that his body does not reject the transplanted kidney, but he will no longer have to undergo dialysis.
His anger has faded: "I wouldn't change what happened, I feel much better."
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Your daughter will have no side effects or complications from an operation that the doctor says is risk-free.
She has no regrets: "I'm not good at taking no," she tells ABC News.
"I would do it over and over again, if it means saving his life and having him here with me," she told CBS News.