A 3-week-old baby received a heart transplant 14 years ago and gained a ‘donor mom’

Felicia Hill, left and Addison spend time together at the Canadian Transplant Games in Vancouver, British Columbia in 2018. (Elaine Yong via CNN Newsource)

When she was 3 weeks old, the left side of Addison McArthur’s heart stopped functioning, and she was put on the top of British Columbia’s transplant waiting list.

Now, the Vancouver native just celebrated her 14th birthday in the middle of National Donate Life Month, which aims to raise awareness about organ, eye and tissue donation.

As Addison tells the story, the doctors said to her parents she’s “probably the sickest baby in Western Canada, if not all of Canada.’”

Her parents, Elaine Yong and Aaron McArthur, would later learn she had left ventricular non-compaction cardiomyopathy, which can cause heart problems like arrhythmias and heart failure.

Addison’s mom was shocked to learn her newborn — her firstborn — was in the middle of a life-or-death situation.

“I think as a new mom, you have all these preconceived ideas of what being a mom’s going to be about (and) of what life’s going to be like watching your child grow up,” said Yong, who was 36 at the time. “Going through that transplant journey with Addison was such a … wow, you can’t control everything. You can’t control the way this is going to go.”

A few days later, she received the call she had been hoping for. On Mother’s Day of that year, the family’s heart surgeon said he’d had found a heart for Addison. Yong was so grateful, but she couldn’t do what she wanted to do: She couldn’t thank the donor directly. Canada’s transplant system, like its United States counterpart, keeps organ donor and transplant recipient ID information private.

Thousands are on waiting lists

Addison is one of the lucky ones, as historically, the need for organs outpaces supply, and patients can languish for years on waiting lists. Nearly 50,000 transplants were performed in the U.S. in 2024; in Canada, almost 3,500 transplants were performed in 2023, and those numbers are climbing in both countries. Currently, just over 100,000 people in the U.S. and nearly 3,500 people in Canada are currently on transplant waiting lists. Many will likely die without the procedure.

A single donor can save up to eight lives, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. But even when a transplant is successful, there’s no guarantee that a donor’s family and transplant recipient will meet, let alone maintain a relationship. National statistics on how many families of organ donors connect with their transplant recipients are hard to pin down in both the U.S. and Canada, and the estimates are low. Hilary Kleine, vice president of communications and registry for Donate Life America, a national organ donation advocacy organization, said her organization is collecting this data.

In the U.S., some local organ procurement organizations that help to recover organs keep that kind of data, like Donor Network West in California and Nevada and LiveOnNY in New York. In Canada, some organ donation organizations, such as B.C. Transplant in Vancouver, where Yong works, have a direct contact program that “allows recipients and donor family members to move beyond anonymous communication.”

Several organ donation experts, including Dr. Nick Murphy, an organ donation ethics researcher at Western University in London, Ontario, say that some donors and transplant recipients also connect independently online .

Meeting the other mom

“It was something I always knew — that if I could meet the donor family, I would want to,” Elaine Yong said.

She had not been private about the journey — she had been blogging about Addison’s transplant to keep friends and family updated. After about a year, she sent a thank-you letter to the donor family through her transplant center, knowing some donors choose not to respond.

To her great surprise, the other mother replied.

“It was the day of Addison’s one-year heart anniversary party,” Yong recalled. “I remember looking at the blog and, like, seeing someone had commented, ‘I’m Addison’s donor mom.’”

“She thought I was fake,” said Felicia Hill, who was 21 and living in Reno, Nevada, when she received Yong’s letter. Hill looked her up online and found her blog.

One year earlier, her baby girl, Audrey Jade Hope Sullenger, had died of unknown causes just six days after she was born.

When Hill agreed to donate Audrey’s organs, Audrey became the youngest organ donor in the state of Nevada that year. Her kidneys went to an adult woman and her heart went to Addison.

Yong saw online that Hill had started doing advocacy work and that the dates matched. “I saw that she had the letter that I had sent, and I knew, 100 per cent, this is our donor mom.”

Yong also confirmed Hill’s story, noting via email, “(There were) a few people who were involved in the case who provided enough hints that really solidified it.” Over time, she said they started communicating, then became Facebook friends, and in 2013, the two women agreed to meet up with their families in Santa Clara, California, for a Donate Life Walk.

Yong brought a stethoscope so Hill could listen to Audrey’s heart in Addison’s chest, and Hill brought Addison a T-shirt commemorating Audrey’s memory.

“I kind of went in there thinking, I’ve got something really precious that belongs to someone else. And like, it’s going be really sad for her. She’s going to be really emotional and thinking about her daughter who’s not here and my daughter’s here,” Yong said. “But it wasn’t like that at all.”

“When I first met her … I just wanted to hug Elaine,” Hill said. “I felt connected immediately knowing that another mother got to raise their child. And that’s what gave me so much happiness.”

Advocating for others

Hill, now 33, said their initial meeting went well because she’d made peace with Audrey’s death, and she now shares her story to encourage others to consider donating organs at advocacy events.

Yong is now 50. She said she was touched by the meeting and it inspired her to become an even stronger advocate for organ donation. In fact, she left a job in journalism to become a communications manager at her local organ donor organization, B.C. Transplant.

The two moms say they communicate a few times a year and sometimes speak at conferences together about their transplant experience with Audrey and Addison.

They consider each other to be family, which now includes Hill’s two children and Addison’s younger sister. Addison refers to Hill as “Auntie Felicia” and sends her medals that she wins in track and swimming competitions. In 2018, Hill traveled to Vancouver to cheer on Addison in an event designed for transplant athletes, called the Canadian Transplant Games.

At the end of April, both families will celebrate Audrey’s birthday. She would have been 14 on April 30. And Hill plans to be in the stands when Addison competes in the World Transplant Games in Dresden, Germany, this summer.

“It’s just really amazing to see that she (Addison) gets to live her life, and she is her own person,” Hill said.

“I like to say organ donation is like the ultimate act of love,” Yong said. “This is like this most amazing gift that you don’t know where it came from when you’re giving it … you have no control over who it goes to, and you also have no idea what happens to it afterwards.”

Written by Eryn Mathewson, CNN