Rozema is a volleyball coach, married to Dean Rozema, and a mother of three. When she contacted Give Life Alberta, she asked about donating a kidney. The team told her she could also give part of her liver, but only if the liver came first. So she agreed to both.
The liver assessment took about three months. The surgery at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton kept her there for six days. She felt sick at first and could hardly eat. At home her children were 11, 9 and 9. The recipient was a baby who, without the transplant, would not have lived to see a first birthday. Rozema never learned the child's name. Both of her donations were anonymous.
Within three months her liver had grown back almost to its normal size.
The rules required her to wait two years before the second operation. When it came, she gave the kidney in honour of the mother of a family friend, a woman who had been waiting for a kidney and died before one could be found. This time Rozema spent two days in hospital. Two weeks later she was doing light exercise again. The kidney went to a stranger on dialysis.
The hospital carried out its first living kidney donation in 1967 and its first living liver donation in 1998. Today Living Donor Services runs from two sites, in Edmonton and at the Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary. Any adult in Alberta can refer themselves for assessment without a doctor's referral, and donors do not pay the medical costs. They can give to someone they love, or to someone they will never meet.
“You can donate a kidney or a piece of your liver and still live a healthy life.”
Those are the words of Cassandra Garneau, a living donor coordinator at Give Life Alberta. Rozema told her story during Living Donor Awareness Week so that someone else scrolling past a stranger's request might stop and keep reading, as she once did.