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.”