It was 10:31 p.m. on Oct. 20, 2025, and the ball was exploding off George Springer’s bat, securing the three-run homer that was to send the Toronto Blue Jays to their first World Series in 32 years.
Jason Anderson, a big Jays fan, slept through it.
A couple of kilometres away, the Fort Frances local lay in intensive care at Toronto General Hospital, hours out of a liver transplant from a stranger he had met only the night before.
He surfaced at about 2 a.m. and, with his priorities admirably intact, asked his nurse: “Who ended up winning the game?” The reply came with a diagnosis attached: “You must be doing OK if you’re worried about baseball!”
A transmission technician with Centra Pipelines who has lived in Fort Frances since 1978, Jason was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC), a rare disease that destroys the bile ducts and, eventually, the liver. After he fell seriously ill again in 2024, his doctor told him, “It’s time to get ready for a transplant.”
On the deceased-donor waiting list, Jason found himself in quite the Hellerian dilemma. In his words, he was “sick enough to need the transplant, but not sick enough to be at the top of the list.”
His best hope was a living donor. His sister, Christina Hahkala, 52, volunteered at once, and then her two sons followed suit.
“He’s my brother and I needed to save his life. I was going to do what I could to help him and that was just all there was to it,” she said. After none of the three proved a suitable match, Jason’s step-daughter and a longtime friend both tested, with the same result.
Feeling out of options, Jason’s wife, Dana, a Grade 8 teacher at Fort Frances High School, posted an appeal on Facebook in late May 2025. It was shared more than 100 times the first night.
“To finally write that and admit in such a public way that we needed help was very humbling,” she said.
The post soon went beyond friends and family and into the feeds of people who had never heard of Jason Anderson. It became, as Jason would later put it, “a share, the share of another share.”
One such share reached Christine Purvis, a 46-year-old hospital pharmacy technician in Sault Ste. Marie who had never once considered living donation. Her first response was the one most of us have had a thousand times.
“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s sad. I hope he finds a liver,’” she said. “And I shared it. And then I scrolled on and thought I’d moved on with my life.”
However, Purvis found she could not move on. She had once signed up as a bone marrow donor but was never selected. At this point in her life, she was between houses, living with her mother, with time on her hands. “I just couldn’t get the thought out of my head,” she said.
So as to not unduly raise Jason’s hopes, Purvis made the decision to test in private, resolving to donate even if she ended up not being a match for Jason. As it turned out, she was a match.
The hospital called Jason in September; when Dana got home, they both broke down in tears. Her school, she said, was “very, very supportive” when she took time off to go with him to Toronto.
The night before surgery, Dana met Purvis in the hotel lobby and brought her, supper in hand, to meet Jason. “I’m just looking at this beautiful angel thinking, ‘this woman is going to save my husband’s life,’” Dana said.
Facing her first major surgery, Purvis had “constant second thoughts,” but getting to know Jason made backing out unthinkable. “I can’t take this away from them,” she remembers thinking. “This is their chance to live.”
Jason, for his part, made Purvis an offer. “If you give me a liver, I’ll come visit you once a year and I’ll fix things around your house for you.” As terms of trade go, this is not the most balanced in history, but he has since kept his side.
This summer the Andersons drove to Sault Ste. Marie and arrived on Purvis’ first night in her new house, and Jason duly fixed things.
“I’m really happy that I didn’t do the anonymous donation option,” she said, reflecting on the warm friendship she has kindled with Jason and Dana ever since.
The ripple effect of kindness has kept spreading from there. On the day Hahkala learned she could not give her brother the 70 per cent of her liver he needed, she asked whether she might give a smaller piece to a child instead.
“Why would you want to do that?” the doctor asked.
“That’s a no-brainer: to save somebody’s life,” she told him.
She waited until her brother had recovered, then in April donated anonymously to a baby girl, with her husband and Jason at her side. She calls her scar “a reminder — a good one.”
A third woman, who saw the post after Hahkala asked her son’s hockey team to share it, was next in line to test for Jason. She has since stepped forward for a young boy, with surgery set for later this month.
“That’s three lives saved,” Hahkala said.
Social media has worked hard for its reputation, and nowadays not many would be eager to be retained as its defence counsel. But this story is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. “Here’s just one glimmer of something amazing that came from a Facebook post,” Dana said.
Purvis puts it even more succinctly: “You make a better world one kind act at a time.”
This month the Andersons return to Toronto to mark the anniversary — a check-up with one of the city’s leading PSC specialists, followed by dinner. There was talk of a show, or perhaps a hockey game.
A ballgame, Jason conceded, was out of the question. The Blue Jays will not be repeating the run this October. The point of the trip, Jason said, is simply to go back to the city where it happened and say, “Hey, I made it a year and everything went well.” Most anniversaries mark time passing. This one marks time granted.
He went back to work after Labour Day, on half days, and his Facebook feed is now full of other people’s appeals for donors: people standing where he stood a year ago, waiting for a stranger to stop scrolling. “Since the day of the surgery, every day has been a bonus,” he said. Spreading the word, he added, “is the biggest legacy I could leave behind.”
The least the rest of us can do is share it.
What can you do?
A living donor can be a spouse, family member, friend, co-worker or stranger, according to the University Health Network’s Centre for Living Organ Donation. Liver donors must be 16 to 60 and in good health, without diabetes, cancer, or kidney or heart disease.
The first step is UHN’s Living Donor Health History Form, available online and sent in with proof of blood type. The centre’s free Tuesday webinars include sessions for people supporting someone who needs a liver or kidney, and on PRELOD, Ontario’s program that reimburses donors’ expenses.
In her interview, Purvis stressed that donors pay costs up front and wait to be reimbursed, which can be hardest on those coming from out of town.
For more information, call 416-340-5400 or email livingorgandonation@uhn.ca.
