Former WIVB anchor gives kidney to stranger, hope to Michigan mom

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Jennifer VanderPoel thought she’d exhausted her pool of potential kidney donors.

Sitting on her living room couch in Grand Rapids, the bubbly mom, wife and former assistant professor had no idea she was about to learn otherwise.

It was Dec. 6, 2023, and VanderPoel was talking to WOOD News 8 in Grand Rapids, Mich. about her search for a living kidney donor.

“The most recent one was my hairdresser’s boyfriend," VanderPoel said of the candidates who stepped up. “Then, at the very last minute, they found that his kidney function wasn’t quite normal enough to donate.”

It wasn’t the first time VanderPoel had a potential donor fall through.

Six times over the last three years she had transplants scheduled, she said, only to be canceled due to illnesses and, in one case, a surgeon’s last-minute trip.

There was a cadaver kidney headed VanderPoel’s way at one point too, until she tested positive for COVID.

“It’s been a lot of ups and downs for me,” said VanderPoel. “I’m just trying to pray and hold on and know that there’s a plan for me, that someday I’ll get a kidney and can go on living, having a life.”

For five years, VanderPoel’s name has languished among more than 2,000 others on Michigan’s cadaver kidney waitlist.

DIALYSIS: SEVEN HOURS, THREE TIMES A WEEK

For four years, dialysis has ruled — and saved — her life.

“When your kidneys don’t function, you don’t live unless you have a means to filter out some of the toxins that build up in your bloodstream,” said VanderPoel, adding that she’s limited to ingesting 30 ounces of liquid every 24 hours.

VanderPoel chose a nocturnal dialysis shift, from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.

For seven, mostly overnight, hours three times a week, she’s hooked to a machine, surrounded by snaking tubes.

“The way you get hooked up so large volumes of blood can get cleaned, you can’t have too tiny of a needle, or it would clot up and nothing would happen,” explained VanderPoel. “It’s a big old needle going in so it’s not comfortable. It’s like a double-edged sword. It’s horrible, but it’s keeping me alive.”

It’s also keeping her from being the wife, mom and assistant professor she once was, said VanderPoel.

When she gets home from dialysis in the early morning hours three times a week, she may sleep for 24 or even 32 hours.

“Just exhausted. Just utterly completely exhausted,” she said. “Sometimes, I can’t even get out of bed … meaning I didn’t see my husband or my daughter for days at a time. They would come to the room and see that I was sleeping and wasn’t able to wake up. My daughter doesn’t remember what I was like; the mom I used to be.”

VanderPoel said that her kidney failure was caused by lupus, an autoimmune disease diagnosed when she was 13.

She’s had a transplant before; in 2009, her aunt gave her a kidney that lasted 12 years.

But this time around, dialysis — and the search for a kidney — have proven much harder.

“I’ve just exhausted the people that we know and are willing to donate,” said VanderPoel. “I’m just trying to maintain my faith, that everything happens for a reason. But on the other hand, you know, every year it looks bleaker and bleaker, right?”

But that was about to change.

The day before the interview, a Grand Rapids woman who didn’t even know Jennifer VanderPoel had donated a kidney on her behalf.

A STRANGER WITH A SPARE KIDNEY

Teresa Weakley isn’t one to ignore a gut instinct.

“I trust those feelings,” said Weakley during an interview at WOOD TV8 in Grand Rapids, where she’s one-half of the Daybreak anchor team and former anchor at WIVB in Buffalo from 2013 to 2016. “When I get an idea in my head, I usually just do it. You can ask (my husband). It’s probably very frustrating sometimes.”

This time, the seeds were planted during an exchange between two moms in a venue unknown for conversation depth.

“I was at Chuck E. Cheese, sitting with my friend whose husband had tried to donate (a kidney) to Jennifer,” recalled Weakley. “And she was telling me why he couldn’t.”

It was February 2023.

“That conversation, it just stayed with me,” said Weakley. “And the feeling that I should see if I can be the person who helps.”

She didn’t know Jennifer VanderPoel, though she’d heard her name in social circles.

“I thought, I’ve known people before who’ve needed kidneys and never had the urge to donate mine,” Weakley relayed. “This feeling must be for a reason.”

Weakley located VanderPoel’s donor search webpage. 

“I’m a wife, mother, daughter, friend, and like you, I’m many other things in this crazy, beautiful life,” wrote VanderPoel, who was 48 at the time. “I very much want to be here for my daughter, to see her graduate, to see her go to college and fulfill her dreams.”  

There was something else that caught Weakley’s eye too; VanderPoel’s struggle with lupus.

“That’s part of what hooked me, I suppose,” Weakley said. “My grandmother had lupus, and she died essentially because of lupus.”

Weakley was just six months old when her grandmother died.

“Everyone always talks about what an amazing woman she was,” said Weakley, who grew up under tumultuous circumstances. “I’ve wondered in the past, what would it have been like if my grandmother were in our lives? She’s someone I wish I had known.”

The lupus connection struck Weakley.

“Thinking if you could give someone the time that you didn’t have with a loved one, you know?” she explained.

Within days of the Chuck E. Cheese conversation, Weakley sought an evaluation at the Trinity Health Kidney Transplant Center in Grand Rapids.

But when tests showed she wasn’t a good match for VanderPoel, Weakley figured she’d hit a dead-end.

She was wrong.

NOT A MATCH? NOT A PROBLEM

“At that point, they said, ‘but you do have other options,’” Weakley recalled.

One of those options, the voucher program, removes barriers to compatibility by matching better-suited living donors with recipients through a nationwide database maintained by the National Kidney Registry.

Weakley would give a kidney, not to VanderPoel, but to a compatible stranger somewhere in the United States.

In return, VanderPoel would receive a voucher good for a kidney from another stranger who’s a better match for her, and who likely donated on behalf of a loved one they did not match.

“It could be their age or their size difference, or it could be that their blood type doesn't match,” explained Trinity Health donor coordinator Sara DeRooy in an interview with News 8. “So, their kidney goes to somebody else across the US, and then their recipient will receive a living donor kidney from somebody that matches them through the US.”

In 2020, Trinity Health became the only adult transplant program in Michigan to partner with the National Kidney Registry.

“It’s such a big program,” DeRooy said of NKR, which facilitates 26% of the nation’s living donor transplants, according to a 2024 report. “It really has been a great blessing to our program and given us a lot more opportunities.”

Weakley had never heard of the voucher program.

“The barrier is always, ‘Oh, I’m not a match,’” noted Weakley. “(But) you don’t have to be. You can donate for someone without donating to them, and if more people knew that it might change things for people who need kidneys.”

That’s Weakley’s goal in sharing her journey: She wants to spread the word about the voucher program. She did not, however, want Jennifer VanderPoel to know that she was considering donating on her behalf.

“Well, up to this point, I wouldn’t want to give her false hope,” explained Weakley during an interview in November 2023. “Like, if this doesn’t work. If there’s something that stops it from happening.”

Over 10 months, Trinity Health’s Kidney Transplant Center assessed Weakley’s fitness to donate, evaluating her through extensive testing: medical, physical and psychological.

Throughout the process, the center repeatedly reminded her that she could back out at any point for any reason, Weakley noted.

While donating a kidney has not been shown to restrict physical ability long-term nor reduce life expectancy, no surgery is without risk.

The potential for harm was not lost on Teresa’s husband, Joe.

“What did I think when she first asked me?” he said in a November 2023 interview. “I was like, ‘Are you crazy?’ I mean, really, my first response was probably silence, and my eyes were huge. I mean, we don’t need to introduce this to our life right now. We don’t need to do this.”

Joe and Teresa both work full-time. They also have four children, ages three to 12.

'WHAT ARE WE ON THIS EARTH FOR?'

“We had conversations that were spirited,” Joe recalled. “But I think we came to an understanding of why this is good for our family, why she wants to do it. She gets to help not one, but two people, ultimately. That’s why she’s doing this, at the core, to help someone else. I mean, what are we on this earth for? What greater example for our kids, right?”

Just after 5:30 the morning of Dec. 5, 2023, Joe was leaning over a hospital bed, hugging his wife before she was wheeled off to the OR to donate a kidney.

“Love you,” said Joe.

“Love you too,” Weakley responded. “See you all on the other side.”

The surgeon had planned to remove Weakley’s kidney laparoscopically, which is minimally invasive with small incisions.

But Weakley’s removal ultimately required open abdominal surgery.

She would recover fully, but she stayed in the hospital a little longer – three days instead of one or two – followed by the standard six-week recovery at home.

There was no rest for Weakley’s kidney though; a courier picked up a cardboard box minutes after the removal.

“Is this a left or right?” asked the courier, Louis Schaefer of Grand Rapids.

“Left,” staff responded.

“Wonderful, great,” Schaefer said. “And it’s in wet ice?”

Schaefer drove Weakley’s kidney to O’Hare airport in Chicago, and from there it was flown to a transplant center in Seattle, Washington.

Weakley was later told her kidney went to a woman, and once transplanted, began producing urine immediately.

Three days after surgery, Weakley’s husband recorded an interview in her hospital room.

“How do you feel right now? How’s the recovery been?” asked Joe.

“The first few days were really hard,” said Weakley. “But I feel a ton better today.”

We checked in with her later at home.

“This is a week and a day out, and I’m feeling really good,” said Weakley.

When asked if she regretted the surgery, she responded, “No, not even a tiny bit.”  

The day after Weakley’s surgery, News 8 sat down with Jennifer VanderPoel at her home in Grand Rapids.

VanderPoel, it turned out, knew that someone was considering donating anonymously to secure a voucher for her; Trinity Health had notified her two months earlier.

But VanderPoel and her husband hadn’t shared that news with anyone, not even their daughter.

“I didn’t want to jinx it,” explained VanderPoel. “I didn’t want to have everybody be so excited and then be let down if something happens. Just because they want to donate doesn’t mean that they can. There are so many hoops they have to go through.”

It was at that point that we shared the recent development.

'JENNIFER, SHE ALREADY DID IT.'

“Jennifer, she already did it,” said News 8 reporter Susan Samples. 

“Oh! OK! OK,” said VanderPoel, her eyes filling with tears. “You should have told me to have Kleenexes out here! Is she okay? How is she doing? Oh my gosh. My daughter’s coming home from college today and this is, oh, I’m sorry. This is such a … It means that I will be getting a kidney. It’s so surreal right now. Hearing that.”

VanderPoel struggled to articulate her gratitude.

“I really can’t put into words how thankful I am for this gift of life, and for giving me the chance to be a wife and a partner and, most importantly, a mother again,” exclaimed VanderPoel. “Words will never express how meaningful, how thankful I am for this gift of life. This opportunity to have a life again, to live.”

But, Jennifer’s exuberance was tempered by the knowledge that finding a compatible kidney for her would be no easy task.

Later, at Trinity Health’s Kidney Transplant Center, Dr. Joel Stracke explained why.

“With her previous transplant, she’s been exposed to other tissues that create antibodies in our blood system and those antibodies then attack foreign tissue,” explained Stracke. “To find her a good match was difficult because of the exposure that she’s had in the past.”

Indeed, two times over six months, the National Kidney Registry identified potential kidneys for VanderPoel, and surgery dates were set only to be canceled when final bloodwork predicted VanderPoel’s body would reject them.

“But with the National Kidney Registry we are open to a lot of donors throughout the country,” continued Stracke, “so we finally found that match for her and it ended up being a good match. It took a while, but we got there.”

A KIDNEY FOR JENNIFER

Ten months after Teresa Weakley gave up a kidney, VanderPoel received one, redeeming her voucher.

“I’m so thankful to the donor,” said Tom Heft, VanderPoel's dad. “(Jennifer’s) mom passed away in January, and she feels like she’s influencing this up there, getting her a kidney. I haven’t been this elated since I don’t know when. For me, she’s always been a perfect daughter, and now I’m still gonna have her.”

VanderPoel’s aunt, Mary Little, who gave her a kidney in 2009, said Jennifer has always been a bright light.

“Just always stayed positive knowing (the transplant) was going to happen,” said Little. “She’s like, ‘Don’t get down, it’s going to happen.’ She’s building everybody else up while we’re trying to keep her going. … She’s just a very special person. Not just to us, but to everyone who meets her.”

Jennifer's donor’s name is Kelly, and she’s a nurse from Washington. The 59-year-old donated at the Mayo Clinic Transplant Program in Phoenix to earn a voucher for a loved one she did not match.

Through the transplant centers in Grand Rapids and Phoenix, News 8 contacted Kelly, who sent a message for VanderPoel via email.

“I find myself thinking about you each day,” wrote Kelly. “Even during the final crossmatch, I hoped nothing would change as I knew you were a special case, and may not find a match very easily. … I hope that you are doing well in your recovery and I hope your new kidney is functioning well. I am very thankful I could donate to you, and I hope you can be out doing what you love most in this world. I wish you only the best, and many years of good health to come.”

Kelly went on to encourage others to consider donating.

“Organ donation is not something people generally think about until it affects someone they know or love,” she wrote. “There are programs out there that help alleviate the burden of lost wages, and money spent to travel to a transplant center if you are donating far from your home. I felt very informed and cared for by the transplant team (at Mayo Clinic in Phoenix), and if you think this is something you would like to do, please reach out to your local transplant center to see if you qualify to become a donor. There are so many people in need.”

In hopes of attracting more living donors, more resources are becoming available.

Founded in 2007, NKR has facilitated nearly 10,000 living donor transplants, matching donors and recipients through its kidney registry. The nonprofit also operates Donor Shield, which reimburses donors for lost wages and travel costs, among other benefits.

“In the unlikely event that a National Kidney Registry donor ever needs a kidney transplant," wrote NKR on its website, “the living donor assistance offered by Donor Shield includes prioritization for a living donor kidney transplant through NKR.”

Michigan recently made living organ donation more attractive by offsetting any costs incurred with a one-time $10,000 tax credit. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed House Bill 4361 into law in mid-November.

ON THE ROAD TO RECLAIMING A FULL LIFE

Six weeks after VanderPoel’s transplant, News 8 checked in with her over Zoom; she’s still in quarantine while her immune system is suppressed to prevent rejection.

“This gift of life has been such a miracle,” said VanderPoel. “The day I got home from the hospital I had so much energy. I was cooking and cleaning.”

News 8 had one final surprise for VanderPoel. Her two donors, Kelly and Teresa, had joined the Zoom.

“Oh! Kelly!” squealed VanderPoel.

“It makes me so happy to hear that you’re doing so well,” said Kelly.

“You are such a blessing,” VanderPoel told her. “You have no idea. You gave me literal life … I can’t believe I’m talking to you.”

She was grateful, too, to Weakley, her voucher donor.

“So, you started this, Teresa,” said VanderPoel, “and Kelly finished it. The two of you! I wouldn’t be here much longer if it weren’t for you guys. I was just really struggling with dialysis. My blood pressure was so low … and it wasn’t sustainable.”

Weakley mentioned the voucher program, and the need to raise awareness about it.

“I had never heard of the voucher system before,” said Weakley. “I didn’t know you could donate and put people to the top of the list. I felt like people should know that if they have someone they want to help.”

She also pointed out that VanderPoel’s donor, Kelly, was from Washington, as was Weakley’s recipient, who chose to remain anonymous.

“It’s wild to me, this circle from Washington to Grand Rapids,” said Weakley.

“Yeah, what are the odds that your recipient was also in the state of Washington,” remarked VanderPoel.

National Kidney Registry Member Centers Map

All three women plan to stay in touch and hope the connection they built will inspire others to consider donating too.

“I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season,” said Kelly.

“This is good news to share before Christmas,” added Weakley.

“Lots and lots to be thankful for,” said VanderPoel. “And now I can say the names of the donors!”