A seriously ill college student in Oklahoma made a joke on TikTok about needing a new kidney. A stranger stepped up.
The kindness of a stranger has made the life of an Oklahoma college student much, much easier.
Katie Hallum was diagnosed with an incurable kidney disease after suffering a seizure and experiencing kidney failure. She was a student at the University of Oklahoma, and doctors had dire news.
She could survive, short-term, with daily dialysis. But what she really needed was a new kidney.
Last summer, she posted a video on her TikTok account, as a joke. "You have something I want," she lip-synched over audio from "The Mandalorian." Her family had praised her ability to try to find humor in a most unfunny situation.
Some 300 miles away in Kansas, nursing student Savannah Stallbaumer saw the video and posted a note in the comments section, offering her own kidney as a solution.
"I would be more than willing to give you a kidney!" Stallbaumer wrote.
Hallum thought yeah, right, and pushed back. Stallbaumer persisted.
"I couldn’t believe it when she first suggested it. In fact, I outright ignored her at first," Hallum wrote on Facebook. "I couldn’t fathom someone who I just met being so adamant on saving my life — but she persisted."
After many, many compatibility tests, Stallbaumer passed them all and was deemed a match by medical staff at a Tulsa transplant center, where Hallum received her new organ.
One year later, the young woman is doing well.
"Words will never be enough to express the depth of my feelings for your sacrifice. You saved my life. You once told me you were working to be a nurse because you wanted to be someone’s hero — but I can tell you now you’re already mine," Hallum wrote on Facebook.
The two women have become good friends.
Hallum, 21, and Stallbaumer, 22, are planning to spend the Christmas holidays together.
"She’s already so many things to me," Hallum posted to social media. "A trusted confidante, someone I can share a laugh with, a person I can gossip with, someone who I admire for working so hard, and more importantly — she’s the girl who saved my life."
