Fathers and daughters often have a special bond. For one family in Missouri, that connection got a whole new meaning when a daughter volunteered to donate an organ to her father. Delayne Ivanowski, a nurse at Mercy Hospital in St. Louis, decided to donate her kidney to her dad John Ivanowski despite his reluctance, per ABC News.
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John was diagnosed with IgA nephropathy, a rare disease that causes kidney damage when your immune system produces antibodies in your kidneys. According to the American Kidney Fund, there is no cure for IgA nephropathy, but treatments can slow the damage to your kidneys. This saw him rely on a dialysis machine every couple of days for about five hours each time, something his daughter didn't find right for him. "I don't think that's any way that anybody should have to live," she said.
Delayne tried to convince her father to let her donate a kidney to him. However, he opposed the idea out of his concern for her. He was also troubled because nearly 16 years ago, he lost his son to neuroblastoma, a type of cancer. "I thought, I lost my boy and if anything happened to Delayne, I don't know what I would do," he said. Despite her father's concerns, she went ahead and hatched a secret plan to donate him a kidney. She knew if she didn't do it, they would have to wait for years to find a suitable donor.
So, she kept her plans under wraps as she slowly fulfilled all the necessary formalities to become a donor. John, who was oblivious to his daughter's plan, received a call that the transplant team had found him an anonymous donor. The surgery was scheduled for February 16, 2023. On the day of the transplant, the team at Washington University & Barnes-Jewish Transplant Center took precautionary measures to ensure that John did not see his daughter. After the operation was successful, the father and daughter recovered in separate rooms. It was a day after the surgery that John discovered his daughter's wholesome act.
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Delayne surprised her father when she came walking through his hospital room door the next day of the transplant. The heartwarming footage was uploaded to TikTok by Delayne (@delayne_i) which showed her father in complete shock. In the opening frames of the clip, John witnessed his daughter walk inside the recovery room and get a full reveal of the identity of his kidney donor. He began to choke up and said, "Oh my God, are you kidding me? I knew you were up to something."
The TikTok clip has received over 5 million views with loads of users dropping in their best wishes for the father-daughter duo. @taylormangus317, wished them a speedy recovery, she wrote, "How amazing of you. My prayers are with you and your family for a fast recovery." Another user, @tdj7599, commented, "That is such an amazing thing you did for your dad. Sending you both lots of healing vibes and prayers."
Delayne hopes her family's story will help raise awareness about the need for organ donation. The 25-year-old said, "If anything, I've saved one life and hopefully I can, with awareness and other things, save other lives by encouraging people to become donors or to take that next step and go get the testing done to become a match." She added, "It hurts, but all the pain is worth it in the end, I think."
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.