It all started when Bridgett Kolls held up a sign at a baseball game.
The Chicago Cubs fan, whose transplant surgery was put on hold for months due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, finally received her kidney last month from a White Sox fan who first spotted her plea on social media last year.
Kolls, 23, of Lombard, took a poster to a Cubs game in May 2019 that read, “This li’l Cubs fan needs a kidney,” and included a phone number she used just for the search.
Her donor, Thomas Alessio, 32, of Chicago, spotted the sign after the Cubs social media team took her photo and blasted it out on Twitter. He texted the number.
Alessio said he decided to offer one of his kidneys to a total stranger because, “I always figure if you’re able to help someone, you have an obligation to do so.”
“I’d rather not say I want to do something. Just do it,” Alessio said.
In a news conference Friday, Kolls said she now has “so much more energy. I feel healthier off of dialysis. I can go back to work, eventually.”
At the time she decided to take her search for a donor public, Kolls was receiving dialysis three times a week to clean her blood, a job her kidneys could no longer do after they were destroyed by lupus.
After volunteering to be a donor, Alessio went through an intense screening process and the surgery was set for March 26 at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.
But the transplant procedure was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, elective surgeries were put on hold in the Chicago area — including most organ transplants.
“It all happened so fast,” Kolls said in an April story on the transplant delays. “Everything was going fine in February, in March the transplant was set up.”
As the number of new coronavirus cases in Illinois began to decline, hospitals started scheduling the surgeries again. Alesso and Kolls finally had theirs on July 8.
In the meantime, the two stayed in touch with texts and phone calls. As restrictions lifted, they finally met in person for lunch before the big day.
They saw each other again as medical staff wheeled Alessio to surgery to retrieve the kidney, Kolls said.
“He had to do his surgery before me, so I’m waiting, I wasn’t expecting to see him or anything. But they rolled his bed past my room and I got to wave and that was so cool,” Kolls said.
Dr. Darshika Chhabra, a nephrologist with Advocate Health Care, said Kolls’ transplant happened largely because she wasn’t afraid to speak up. The wait list for kidneys in the Chicago area can be at least five years.
“It’s not easy. It’s a big ask to say, ‘Hey, I need a kidney,’ and put yourself out there,” Chhabra said. “No one wants to talk about kidney disease.”
In addition, Chhabra said, the outcome for transplant recipients is much better with a living donor kidney.
Still, the transplant team is careful with potential donors to make sure they are doing it because they want to and for the right reasons, Chhabra said.
If donors decide to go through with the surgery, they are vetted with a wide battery of tests that include urine samples and blood draws, Chhabra said.
To mark the surgery’s success, Chicago Cubs center fielder Ian Happ on Friday sent a recorded video inviting Kolls, Alessio, their families and the transplant team to a Cubs vs. White Sox game in 2021.
“Let’s celebrate at Wrigley next year, all right?” Happ said.
gbookwalter@chicagotribune.com
