Sisters used Craigslist to find a kidney donor for their dad. Now they help others.

In 2007, Heather Flood was riding the Craigslist wave. She, along with her sisters, Jennifer and Cynthia, who all live in Westchester County, N.Y., had been using its vast database to sell items, find child care services and network. What they didn’t expect was that it would help save their father’s life.

The sisters’ successful pursuit of an organ on Craigslist broke ground in the medical world, they said, and now they’ve made it their mission to help others.

It all began that summer when Heather noticed the skin of her father, Daniel, turning yellow and green, an ominous sign. “My father was in kidney failure,” she said. “He was born with one kidney. He was the last of 10 children, and he liked to make the joke that they ran out of parts.”

None of the sisters was a compatible match for his blood type. So he signed up for the national waiting list, but they knew it could take years for him to get a transplant.

With limited options, the women did something that was unthinkable at the time: They posted an ad on Craigslist. “Please help me find a kidney for my Dad,” it read, which they thought sounded desperate, but the situation was dire. Their father needed to find a kidney within six months or he’d have to go on dialysis.

Yes, they received some weird responses to the ad. But what mattered was the one from, ironically, an old high school classmate.

“She ended up working for Newsradio 880 in Manhattan, and I think she was selling a car or buying a car, I don’t remember,” Jennifer said. “So she finds the ad and she goes, ‘I’m putting you guys on the radio. This is crazy, what you’re doing. No one has ever done this.’ So she puts it on the radio, and sure enough, all these people, thousands of people reach out to us wanting to test for our dad. It was incredible.”

Amid the deluge of interested strangers, the sisters realized there was another barrier to their father getting a kidney.

“[The hospital] didn’t want stranger donors,” Jennifer said. “They thought we were selling organs, that it was a money exchange. So we had to make it up and sort of lie and say that these people were friends now, because the hospitals wanted to take away the donors.”

“There was a lot of that thinking that we [were] doing something illegal,” Heather added.

Eventually they found a woman in Monterey, Calif., who said she would consider donating if there were no other donors. When another option didn’t work out, they went back to her. “She says to us, ‘Can you give me a month? I have to think about it,’” Jennifer said. “And that was hard. So we go back to her in a month, and then she finally says, ‘I want to do it. I want to help save your dad.’”

“She was almost a perfect match for my father, which was unheard of,” Heather said.

They lied to the hospital and said she was a friend. She donated her kidney to their father on Dec. 12, 2008, and the transplant was a success.

“Then all the media got involved … and we told the truth,” Jennifer said. “No one ever knew that this was from Craigslist.”

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, actually reached out to the sisters at the time and told them the outcome was “great for the people involved” and that “Craigslist is frequently used for unexpected acts of kindness,” he told Yahoo News.

Before their father even received his new organ, they created the Flood Sisters Kidney Foundation in April 2008, realizing they had found a new mission that gave them more purpose.

Now they’re helping to save other lives, and they secure about one to two transplants per year through their foundation, but their goal is to strive for 15 to 25 a year with the proper staff. They’re currently working with four patients in need of kidneys.

Their patients

Meire Carlos Santos is a 44-year-old housekeeper living in Greenwich, Conn., with her 10-year-old daughter, Melanie. Santos, who is originally from Brazil, has Type A blood, meaning she can accept a kidney donor with Type A or O blood.

“She’s under 10% kidney functioning [a kidney function below 15% is a sign of kidney failure]. … They’re ready for transplant. So she’s kind of nearing dialysis,” Jennifer said.

The foundation is also working with John Cusmano, 65, who lives in Toms River, N.J. He needs a kidney donor with Type B or O blood.

“We have four patients we are working with on our website, but when we highlight one, donors then can test for all,” Jennifer said.

14 successful transplants

With the success of their father’s transplant, hospitals changed their tune and wanted to work with them, the sisters said, recognizing this new method of pairing recipients with donors.

“We start matching people from there,” Jennifer said. “With all [the] media attention, we’re getting all these donors, and we start doing transplants. To date we’ve done 14. Just last March [2022] was our 14th transplant, and we get all different sorts of calls, everything is referral-based. 2015 was a big year for us.”

They had received a call from Jerry Edelstein, the attorney for singers Jon Bon Jovi and Dolly Parton. He was 76 at the time and needed a kidney transplant or he would die.

“I tell him, ‘We need to advocate for you, and you really need to get Dolly on board,’” Jennifer said. “He says, ‘No, Dolly and Jon are my two best clients, and there’s no way I could ask them to advocate for me. I don’t do things like that.’ I said, ‘We need to put Dolly on YouTube or something and really get her to advocate for you.’ So she does it and [calls it] the Christmas Wish. Hundreds of donors now reach out again, and we save Jerry’s life.”

Realizing the power of the foundation, Edelstein also wanted to get Bon Jovi involved by way of performing a benefit concert. The sisters didn’t think anything like that would ever happen.

“Jon does the concert, and he’s so grateful that we saved his attorney, and our dad got to see that,” Heather said. “So our dad lived an additional 10 years to see Jon involved in the foundation growing, and it was the happiest time for him to see that.

“His kidney was still viable when he died; he had skin cancer.”

Facts about being a living organ donor

There were more than 42,000 organ transplants conducted in 2022, a record number. Still, there are more than 100,000 people on the national waiting list in any given year.

Of the procedures that took place in 2022, 6,466 were from living donors, a slight decrease from 2021, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

“It’s certainly a resource and a pathway to transplantation that could really significantly make a difference in terms of getting people transplanted faster with better-quality organs,” Dr. Danielle Haakinson, a surgeon who specializes in abdominal transplants and leads the Living Donor Program at Yale Medicine, told Yahoo News.

Living donor transplants help save the lives of people with end-stage liver or kidney disease by reducing their time on the transplant waiting list. Because those donors are healthier at the time of transplant, the recipients often have improved outcomes, a quicker recovery and a longer-lasting organ, according to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“Kidneys are one of those organs where you truly have a built-in spare. So you can live a perfectly normal life with just one kidney,” Haakinson said.

“In fact, some people are born with only one kidney and may never know it,” she added. “Some of our people step forward to be kidney donors and they have no idea they don’t have a spare until, you know, we do a CT scan and detect that they don’t have an extra one to give.”

She added that it’s important to support donors as much as possible to make the process work for them without a major burden.

“We look at how donation may impact their job, their life, their livelihood, who’s going to be their caregiver, whether or not they would be at risk of any depression or anxiety. So it’s really a very thorough and holistic evaluation [to determine whether that donation will cause] any long-term consequences,” Haakinson said. “And the average donor who’s approved for kidney donation will feel 100% back to normal within two to three weeks.”

A living donor can be anyone who has a blood type that’s compatible with the recipient’s: parents, children, husbands, wives, friends, co-workers, even strangers. In most cases, living donors provide one of their two healthy kidneys. Though it's much less common, living donors can also gift a part of their liver, lung, pancreas or islet cells (the cells inside the pancreas that make insulin), according to the Organ Procurement & Transplantation Network.

The first successful kidney transplant took place in 1954. The first liver and lung transplants with living donors followed many years later, in 1989 and 1990, respectively.

Haakinson says Yale’s facility makes a lifelong commitment to donors and recipients. “Our philosophy at the Center for Living Organ Donors is that we welcome our previous donors and people who have stepped forward to be donors into our transplant family [through] monitoring and engagement. It is not a replacement for health insurance or having a primary care doctor. But we are a lifelong resource.”

As for the Flood sisters, they hope to take over their foundation full-time and build a wellness center to support people going through the transplantation process.

One of the biggest takeaways from their experience is the importance of advocating for one’s own health, just as they did for their father. Jennifer Flood was 40 when she learned that she has only one kidney, like her dad.

“I found that I have one kidney, and Cynthia and I are twins. I just knew I needed to get an ultrasound, and I kept pushing my doctor to get it done. They kept telling me, ‘No, you’re too young for that. You don’t need that.’ And I said, ‘I know my body, and I just want to see what’s going on,’” Jennifer said.

Daniel Flood died on April 4, 2019, but not before telling his daughters he was proud of them, they said.

April is National Donate Life Month, and the women are making a push to help their four patients and anyone else in need. To find out more about their organization and how to contact the sisters, information is available on the foundation website.