Extraordinary stranger answered Jewish News donor appeal and saved my life

A few minutes after seeing the woman who saved her life for the first time since their transplant operations, Ruth Adley still could not stop looking at her.

Not in shock exactly. Not even disbelief.

Just trying to take in the fact that the stranger who had carried her through the worst period of her life was suddenly sitting opposite her in a quiet hospital canteen.

“It’s amazing that it could have been anybody who gave me a kidney,” Ruth says softly, turning towards Clare, 54. “But I felt such a connection to Clare straight away.”

The two women talk through everything they have been through together. Nearby sits Ruth’s sister Sue, who has watched the entire ordeal unfold from the beginning.

In December 2024, Clare was simply a stranger reading Jewish News at home in Bristol.

The following morning, she sent an email.

“Hi, I’m willing to be tested to see if I’m a match for a kidney for Ruth.”

That message changed both of their lives forever.

For Ruth, a grandmother from Barnet living with Crohn’s disease and polycystic kidney disease, the appeal in Jewish News had come at the end of one of the hardest periods of her life.

Her kidney function had fallen dangerously low. She was exhausted, frightened and running out of options.

Ruth first appealed for a donor through Jewish News in October 2023. Multiple people came forward, and one eventually became a donor match.

But after months of testing, the donor withdrew at the last minute because of personal circumstances.

“I literally remember getting a text saying she couldn’t do it,” Ruth recalls. “I just thought: ‘What am I going to do now?’”

By December 2024, with Ruth’s condition worsening, the family made a second appeal through Jewish News.

That was the article Clare read.

“The thing that hit me most wasn’t even the kidney,” Clare says. “It was the disappointment. Thinking something life-changing is finally going to happen, and then suddenly it doesn’t.”

By then, Ruth’s world had become consumed by hospital appointments, blood results and fear.

“I knew that once my kidney function went under 10 percent there would be dialysis,” she says. “And I was petrified.”

Her daughter Natasha refused to stop searching.

“She was on the case,” Ruth says. “She said: ‘Right, we’re going to do everything we can to find you a kidney.’”

Clare had never previously planned to become a living kidney donor, though helping medically vulnerable people was not entirely unfamiliar to her. She had regularly donated blood and platelets for years and says she had always believed strongly in doing practical things to help others where she could.

I suppose I’ve always believed if you can help somebody, you should.

But donating a kidney still felt enormous.

“It just felt right,” she says simply. “At every stage, every time the tests matched, it felt right.”

For Clare, who, like Ruth, is Jewish, there was also something deeply emotional about the connection between two people who had never met.

“You’re reading it in the Jewish News, so there’s already that connection,” she says. “Then, when they explained the genetic matching, it completely blew my mind. That we didn’t know each other, but there was enough shared ancestry there for this to work.”

She pauses for a moment before continuing.

“That whole idea of heritage and ancestry really moved me. Stories from our families are probably similar somewhere down the line. It made me feel connected to Ruth before we’d even met.”

At a time when the Jewish community has often felt battered by rising antisemitism and division, Clare says the experience also felt like an act of hope.

We are living in a really difficult time. And it felt like a really nice thing to do – to save a Jewish life.

Ruth remembers immediately sensing something different about her.

“When I found out there was a match, I just knew from the way she was that she wouldn’t let me down,” she says. “She wasn’t doing it half-heartedly.”

The testing process took months. Blood tests. DNA matching. Scans. Psychological assessments. Endless appointments.

For Clare, the hardest part was waiting.

“You start planning your life around dates,” she says. “You think: maybe summer would work best, maybe this week, maybe that week. And you just want to get on with it.”

Telling her family she planned to donate a kidney to a stranger brought a mixture of reactions.

“My daughters were fine,” she says. “My son was a bit like… he wouldn’t even empty the dishwasher, so the idea of giving a kidney was way beyond his thinking.”

Her parents initially struggled more with the idea.

“They just didn’t really understand it,” she says. “It wasn’t in their frame of reference. But once you explain it, once people hear about it more, it becomes less frightening.”

Her husband, she jokes, discovered during her recovery that nursing was “not his natural skill”.

“But he was very supportive,” she adds quickly. “And my eldest daughter was amazing. She kept everything going while I was in the hospital.”

For Ruth’s family, the match felt almost impossible to believe.

“They were overwhelmed,” Ruth says. “Absolutely overwhelmed.”

Sue, sitting nearby, smiles quietly as she listens to the two women speak. Watching her sister become more unwell over the past two years had been deeply painful, she later explains.

You just want somebody you love to get their life back. And Clare has given Ruth that chance.

Ruth’s grandchildren were too young to fully understand the complexity of what was happening, though they knew “Gaga”, as they call her, kept disappearing into the hospital.

Because of the size of the cyst-covered kidneys caused by her condition, surgeons first had to remove one kidney before the transplant could even happen.

By the time she underwent dialysis, her kidney function had dropped to around six percent.

“The whole day disappeared,” Ruth says of dialysis treatment. “You’d come home exhausted and just go straight to bed.”

For Clare, one fear overshadowed everything else.

“The biggest fear was waking up and being told it hadn’t worked,” she says. “That everybody had gone through all of this – and then the kidney had been wasted.”

Instead, the transplant was immediately successful.

Ruth’s kidney function rapidly climbed to almost 50 percent.

I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t had numbers like that for years.

But the ordeal was far from over.

Weeks later, Ruth was rushed back into the hospital for emergency surgery after developing severe complications linked to her Crohn’s disease.

By then, Clare had become emotionally invested in Ruth’s recovery in a way neither of them fully expected.

“We were messaging after surgery,” Clare says. “And then suddenly everything went quiet.”

Eventually, a message arrived from Ruth’s daughter explaining she was seriously unwell and might need another emergency operation.

“It was horrible,” Clare says quietly. “You feel completely helpless.”

Ruth ultimately underwent a third major surgery after developing a strangulated hernia, forcing surgeons to remove part of her intestine.

“I was very lucky,” she says simply.

For Clare, watching from afar was frightening.

“You’re doing so well, and then suddenly there’s this setback,” she says. “And because we’d gone through all of this together, you feel it emotionally too.”

Even now, recovery continues. Ruth still tires easily and recently celebrated her 70th birthday in hospital. She missed birthdays and family milestones with her grandchildren while recovering.

There were points where I wondered what I was going to miss next.

Now, for the first time in years, she can finally think about the future again.

“The last few days are the first time I’ve started feeling properly better,” she says. “Now I can start looking forward again.”

At one point during the reunion, Clare jokes that her main concern after surgery was whether “her” kidney was behaving properly inside Ruth.

“It’s a bit like when your children are staying at somebody else’s house,” she laughs. “You just want to know they’re behaving.”

Ruth bursts out laughing beside her.

That ease between them now feels less like a donor and recipient and more like old friends.

“My friends all say: ‘You’ve got a new best friend,’” Ruth smiles.

The experience has changed Clare too.

“You can feel quite helpless in life sometimes,” she says. “Like you’re not really making any difference. But this felt life-affirming.”

She now regularly messages strangers online who are searching for organ donors.

I always tell them: ‘I’ve just given my kidney to Ruth – it can happen.

Asked what she would say to somebody considering becoming a donor, Clare pauses.

“Go and get tested,” she says. “You don’t know until you know.’”

She is careful not to pretend the process is easy.

“You do need the time to recover,” she says. “You need support around you. There are moments when you think, ‘Why am I not recovering faster?’ But ten weeks later, I’m basically back to normal.”

Then she smiles.

“And every time I had a bad day recovering, I’d think: ‘Well, Ruth’s kidney is working.’ And somehow that makes it easier.”

Ruth says she would tell anybody currently waiting for a donor not to give up hope.

“You have to do everything you can,” she says. “Use social media. Tell your story. Put it everywhere. You just never know who might read it.”

For Ruth, the transplant has given her something even more precious than improved health.

Time.

Time with her grandchildren. Time outside hospital wards. Time to finally start planning life again.

Towards the end of the reunion, the conversation turns to gratitude.

There aren’t enough times I could thank her.

Ruth pauses before adding: “I want to say thank you to all the amazing doctors, nursing and ICU staff. They all went above and beyond to reassure us and give us the most outstanding care.”

She specifically praises staff at the Royal Free Hospital, part of the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, describing the treatment throughout the process as “absolutely fantastic.”

Clare immediately shakes off the praise being directed towards her.

“It does involve everybody,” she says. “Nobody really goes through something like this alone.”

It is impossible not to think about how easily none of this might have happened. One article unread. One email unsent. One stranger deciding it all sounded too frightening, too inconvenient or too impossible.

Instead, a 54-year-old woman in Bristol read about another woman’s collapsing kidneys and decided to help.

And now, because of that decision, Ruth Adley gets to go home and continue living her life.