kindness. And a big middle finger to SAS Airlines, who were absolutely horrific to deal with in the aftermath. I would never fly them again.
Seven hours after cancelling all of our European flights and hotels, I received the email from Jenn’s transplant coordinator with the name of her donor: Niels Domogalla of Witten, Germany.
***
We thought it was pretty cool that this kid sent a picture of his bucket list within hours of us finding him. Almost immediately, they were IMing about Africa, safaris, America, him wanting to see the world and the dreams of a now 23-year old engineering student in Germany, who just found the woman whose life he saved twice by stopping his life and being kind.
Or as he wrote: “I did this for you because I believe it is our assignment to help people when they need help the most.”
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(Coincidentally, we’d soon learn that his beautiful, humble home is 6.1 miles from a stadium in Dortmund we visited during the 2006 World Cup to see a Trinidad-Sweden first-round match that ended nil-nil. It’s kind of amazing to think there was a 13-year old boy that close, who would save her life twice over the next decade!!!)
Want something else randomly strange? His brother is now a physical therapist for the Borussia Dortmund soccer club that plays at that stadium in the Bundesliga.
Needless to say, Jenn rallied a bit during July and we began communicating with Niels several times a day and learning about his life. Obviously, once he saw our world – and my sports universe and 25 years of media blatherings – on Facebook and the internet, he had plenty of “catch up reading” to do about the #JennStrong journey that he played the most vital role in saving her life.
It turned out that all of the blogs I wrote, all of the pictures I posted, all of the video we shot, all of the gruesome details of Jenn’s near-death experience were chronicled for him.
Niels wanted links to all of it. He began reading and asking questions. He wanted to know everywhere she’d been and how he got called a second time to save her life again.
The first thing we noticed about his online “likes” was a Pittsburgh Steelers sticker on his homepage. Needless to say, we corrected that issue very early.
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***
Jenn’s mood and energy picked up in July after meeting Niels online. It was pretty apparent that we needed to get across the pond to meet him. On July 18, we booked a nonstop flight to Frankfurt, Germany from BWI for the Labor Day weekend. We kept it short – just four days because we were trying to be conservative given Jenn’s strength and health. It also gave her six weeks to rest and get strong enough to make the trip.
I wrote at length about our visit with him.
From doing my 30-30 MLB #GiveASpit baseball tour two summers ago and planning an NHL #PuckLeukemia tour for March 2016 that never happened because Jenn’s cancer returned, I knew a lot about sports and schedule releases. I knew Niels was an NBA and Dallas Mavericks fan and I knew the 2016-17 schedule was to be released on or around August 11th.
Once it was released, I would plot his trip to America around his bucket list and the whereabouts of the Dallas Mavericks and Dirk Nowitzki.
By the time we arrived in his Deutschland homeland on August 30, I already had everything booked for him in America in November.
The fact that the Ravens were home twice in four days and the Mavericks were going to be in New York (a bucket list place for Niels) just four days later …
