The video starts simply enough with a woman, identified as Heather Schaeffer, drinking a large jug of water in her kitchen and explaining she is trying to keep her kidneys healthy. Yet, soon enough, it grows more serious as Heather explains that she is preparing to donate her kidney to a complete stranger. Posted in January of 2022 on YouTube under the title, “Adventures with my Kidney Part 1,” Heather then goes on to describe how she found herself in the unusual situation.

In December 2021, a New Jersey woman named Toshira Maldonado-McIntosh, posted a prayer request on the Facebook group, “The Laughing Christian.” “Please pray for my husband,” the post read, “that God sends a type B+ living kidney donor to him. We believe in God for a miracle. Please pray for him.” Schaeffer, who lives in Texas and is a member of the group, saw the post and explained that when she read the post, she felt, “that’s for me.” Being B+ herself and feeling called by God to do something, Schaeffer hesitantly reached out to McIntosh on Facebook to find out more. “So, I messaged the lady about 30 minutes later and wrote, “I am B+ [blood type] and I’d like to look into if I can donate my kidney,’” Schaeffer recalled.

McIntosh then shared the information for her living-donor coordinator so Schaeffer could find out more about whether she would be a match for McIntosh’s 48-year-old husband, Roy. “What are the odds that a Caribbean man in New Jersey and a woman from Scotland living in Texas would even find one another, let alone be compatible?” Roy’s wife asked. Heather, too, was hesitant about where everything would lead and wasn’t able to speak to her husband right away because he was deployed. However, by April 2022, Schaeffer’s third video sharing her journey announced that she and Roy were a confirmed match and had booked the surgery. By June, Roy underwent kidney transplant surgery at Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden.

The surgery was a success and Roy praised God, saying he felt 20 years younger. Prior to the surgery, he was receiving dialysis 3 days a week, five hours a day. The process of dialysis, as explained by Dr. John Radomski a transplant surgeon at Virtua explained, is very difficult on the body. “When on dialysis, you are essentially asking a machine to do in a few hours what the kidneys would normally do over the course of a few days. It takes a lot out of someone.” Eight weeks after the surgery, Roy, his wife, and four of his children were able to thank the stranger that had changed his life when Heather and her two children came to Roy’s front lawn. “We love Heather and we are forever grateful,” Roy said of the joyful meeting. “Perfect stranger, perfect match, perfect God,” Heather stated in one of her videos. Heather acknowledged the strangeness and the risks involved in giving a kidney to someone that she had never met. Yet she also maintained her belief that God was working behind the scenes in all things. When reviewing the risks and questions she’d received, she responded confidently, “When God tugs on your heart to do something, you don’t say no.”