Chris Dempsey and Heather Krueger — The Overheard Conversation and the Liver (2015)

Chris Dempsey, who worked for the village of Frankfort, Illinois, overheard a coworker talking about her cousin: a young woman dying of liver failure who needed a transplant. He had never met her. He volunteered to be tested, was found to be a match, and in March 2015 donated 55 percent of his liver to her. They married 19 months later.

The woman was Heather Krueger. In March 2014, just before her 25th birthday, she had been diagnosed with stage 4 liver disease caused by autoimmune hepatitis. By June she was in liver failure and was told she had less than a 50 percent chance of living more than two months. She needed a living donor. Dempsey, after overhearing his coworker — Krueger's cousin — describe the situation, got tested for a stranger and turned out to match on blood type, health, and liver size.

The operation took place at UI Health, the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago, and ran more than eight hours. Surgeons removed 55 percent of Dempsey's liver and transplanted it into Krueger; both organs regenerated and both patients recovered. Over the roughly two-month recovery the two grew close. They were engaged by the end of 2015 and married on October 15, 2016, in Tinley Park — 19 months to the day after the transplant, as the hospital and CBS both noted. Their story was later made into the Hallmark film Once Upon a Christmas Miracle.

The Case For and Against

This is a Mode B claim — a chain of naturally possible events whose arrangement looks like more than chance. The natural reading takes the chain link by link. 1) The medicine is ordinary: living-donor liver transplantation is a standard procedure, the liver regenerates, and a 55 percent lobe donation is routine at a transplant center. Nothing in the surgery or the survival needs a special account. 2) The match is less improbable than it first sounds. Liver matching is far more permissive than kidney matching, resting mainly on blood-type compatibility and anatomy rather than fine tissue typing, so a healthy volunteer of a compatible blood type has a genuine chance of qualifying. 3) Two people who endure a shared trauma and a long recovery together sometimes fall in love; that is a known human pattern.

What the natural reading holds without strain is the part that actually carries the story — that Dempsey chose to be tested for a woman he had never met. That is the load-bearing element, and it is a decision, not a coincidence. The only chance-like link in the whole sequence is his being within earshot of the conversation, and even that placed nothing in front of him but an opportunity he then had to take. The marriage grew out of the act. We put the probability that this was more than coincidence at 9 percent. The one improbable element is the overheard conversation; everything decisive after it was Dempsey's choice.