MIAMI — When Damian Rzeznikiewiz walked through the apartment door, bouquet in hand, Jamie Kaplan’s chin quivered with emotion.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hey,” she replied in a tremulous tone, and then opened her arms wide. 

Within seconds the two strangers fell into each other’s embrace. He told her how good she looked, how happy he was to meet her. Weeping, she barely managed, “I can’t talk now.” 

Kaplan, 50, had wanted to meet Rzeznikiewiz since that day in August 2010 when she had the bone marrow transplant that saved her life. Of course, at that time she knew little about her donor except that he was a 23-year-old male who lived out of the country. 

“I wanted to thank him, a total stranger, for doing something like that,” Kaplan said. “Everyone in my family wanted to meet this angel, this absolute angel.”

Just after the New Year, in her mother’s Aventura, Fla., apartment, Kaplan got her wish. Rzeznikiewiz, her angel, flew in from Toronto to join his family vacationing in Aventura. Kaplan of Macon, Ga., was in town visiting her mother, Letty Kaplan, and sister, Barbara Kaplan Gertner. Also witnessing the joyous reunion were her two brothers, her rabbi, and Rzeznikiewiz’s parents, Bruno and Claudia. 

Rzeznikiewiz was a bit overwhelmed. Now 25 and a medical student, he insisted he is neither hero nor angel.

“It’s my duty as a human being,” he said of his life-saving donation. “That’s what we’re here for — to help each other out. It’s really a no-brainer.”

The backstory

The events that brought Kaplan and Rzeznikiewiz together began in November 2009, when Kaplan, the head tennis coach at Stratford Academy in Macon, began suffering from pangs she mistook for sciatic pain. As a former professional tennis player who had made it to each of the four Grand Slam events, she was used to physical suffering after undergoing numerous surgeries. She figured her most recent experience was the result of playing in a tournament five days in a row.

But after six weeks, the pain was so excruciating that she contacted her orthopedic surgeon. X-rays, an MRI and a CT scan followed and in April 2010 doctors delivered the diagnosis: extra medullary acute myeloid leukemia — AML for short. Her form of AML was actually quite rare and presented itself as tumors. One of her three tumors was wrapped around a nerve. Hence, the pain.

She started chemotherapy in May 2010, followed by radiation, but she knew from the beginning that her rare form of AML would require a bone marrow transplant. 

About a year earlier and several hundred miles away, Rzeznikiewiz was an undergraduate studying at York University in Toronto. A friend who belonged to a fraternity had told him about a donor drive sponsored by the Gift of Life National Bone Marrow Foundation, based in Boca Raton, Fla. “It was a cheek swab, no big thing. I didn’t think much about it,” he recalled.

Over the next few months Rzeznikiewiz would get three calls from the registry identifying him as a possible match, but initial blood tests would eventually rule him out as a perfect match. Not in Kaplan’s case, however.

He and his father were eventually flown to Boston where the bone marrow was harvested, a procedure he said was quite simple. “I’d do it over and over again, however many times they need me,” he said. “The few hours I took off were well worth it.”

‘The power of one’

Rzeznikiewiz downplayed his participation, but Jay Feinberg, the executive director of the Gift of Life and a recipient himself, says the selfless act is a lifesaver for people who may have no other hope to combat a deadly disease. 

“It’s so important for people to recognize that only one person is needed to save a life,” Feinberg said. “It’s the power of one.”

More than 10,000 patients in the U.S. suffering from life-threatening blood diseases need an unrelated donor for a bone marrow transplant, but only about half will receive one through an international donor registry. Matches for genetic compatibility can be challenging, especially for racial and ethnic minorities who tend to be under-represented in donor registries, and the goal is to recruit more donors. 

At the one-year anniversary of her transplant, Kaplan filled out the paper work to contact her donor. It took several weeks, but when Rzeznikiewiz was emailed his recipient’s information, he did what any twentysomething would do. He googled her name. He also read her blog, where she wrote about her hopes of meeting her donor. And he discovered how Kaplan devoted her time to helping others in her community. Ironically, she had been involved with the American Cancer Society for several years and ran the Ladies Pink Ribbon Golf Tournament in her area. She was also active with the Macon Rescue Mission and served on various tennis association boards.

In fact, when Rzeznikiewiz phoned Kaplan for the first time, she was on a call with another Macon native, former Major League pitcher John “Blue Moon” Odom, planning a fundraising event for a shelter.

“I thought, I couldn’t have picked a better person,” Rzeznikiewiz said.

Kaplan, on the other hand, was so overcome with emotion when she received that first call that “I couldn’t stop sobbing. I couldn’t even speak. I had to hand the phone to a friend of mine who was there.”

Both Rzeznikiewiz and Kaplan hope this will be the start of a lifelong friendship. “We now have a bond that can’t be broken,” Rzeznikiewiz says.