GORHAM, Maine — Katie Zarrilli Doyen creates funny videos about Maine for social media, from how long to wait before turning the heat on in the fall — “You know the rules, no heaty until trick-or-treaty” — to how Mainers prepare for a snowstorm.
But in some posts last year, she deviated from her usual homespun humor and got personal: her husband Matt needed a kidney donation.
She wasn’t a match and neither was anyone in her husband’s inner circle of family and friends, so the Gorham couple decided to open up on social media — a plea to the world.
The video from about a year ago was shared widely by Zarrilli Doyen’s thousands of followers on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, where Sarah Konchalski, a pharmacist who lives in Wayne, saw it. Touched by the story, she was inspired to help.
Konchalski also wasn’t a match for Matt Doyen, but donated a kidney anyway on his behalf through the National Kidney Registry.
Her gift gave him a voucher that put him higher on the registry’s transplant list, according to a doctor on Doyen’s care team. Less than six months later, on Jan. 15, Doyen underwent surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, receiving a kidney from an anonymous donor.
Doyen, who has battled health issues for years, told the Press Herald his new kidney is functioning normally and that he should be fully recovered in about six weeks. He said he was “floored” when he heard about Konchalski’s donation.
“I was so shocked that someone could be so kind, especially because we didn’t know Sarah from anyone,” he said. “That she was so generous.”
Konchalski’s kidney, which she donated in August, went to a 2-year-old in Wisconsin.
“I’ve always had the donation bug in me,” said Konchalski, 30, who also donated eggs to a couple having fertility issues. “I had thought about donating a kidney before, but maybe just for half a second before I moved onto something else. When I saw that video, it was inspiring and I put myself in their situation.”
Zarrilli Doyen, 35, said it’s an example of “Mainers helping Mainers” and that neighborly connection is one reason the couple moved back to the state from Maryland in 2024.
A long health journey
Doyen, 37, grew up in Mapleton, a 10-minute drive from Presque Isle, on his family’s potato farm.
“I was healthy growing up, loved sports and played basketball, baseball, hockey,” he said.
But in 2008, during his sophomore year at the University of Maine in Orono, where he was majoring in civil engineering, he started to become frequently sick with fevers, infections and fatigue. At first doctors believed Doyen was contracting viruses that often sweep through college campuses, but the symptoms persisted and he was later diagnosed with leukemia.
Doyen said he went through a series of treatments, including chemotherapy, and has been cancer-free for more than 15 years. But when Doyen underwent a bone marrow transplant in 2011 to treat the leukemia, he contracted graft versus host disease, or GVHD, a rare complication where the donated stem cells attack the host cells, treating them as a threat.
The GVHD eventually caused Doyen to have reduced lung functioning, sometimes landing him in hospitals for months at a time. By the time he received a double lung transplant — in 2016 from a deceased donor — he needed an oxygen tank at all times to breathe.
While battling leukemia, Doyen finished his civil engineering degree.
In 2017, he met Zarrilli Doyen, who grew up in Vassalboro and Gorham and, at the time, worked in television news at Presque Isle’s WAGM-TV. They fell in love, later moved to Maryland, where she had landed a job at a TV station, and married in 2021. Zarrilli Doyen hosted a lifestyle show for WBOC-TV, where she said she honed communication skills that later led to her deciding to launch her social media career.
During that time, Doyen was relatively healthy, but needed frequent checkups.
Eventually, he said, the medication needed for the lung transplant, possibly combined with residual damage from the GVHD, resulted in a slow decline of his kidneys.
‘The greatest gift’
After years in Maryland, Maine called them home.
Both have family here and Doyen needed to be closer to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he has been getting care since he first became sick with leukemia.
In the months before the surgery, his kidney function had reduced to the point where he almost needed to go on dialysis.
Zarrilli Doyen posted a video in December about her husband getting the news his kidney surgery was happening.
“After what’s felt like the longest wait, this Christmas my husband and I got the greatest gift we could have asked for,” she said in the video.
The couple thanked Konchalski.
“This didn’t happen by accident though,” Zarrilli Doyen told her followers. “If you need to believe in the goodness of people, take a look at Sarah Konchalski, a Mainer who doesn’t know us from Adam but learned about my husband and was moved to donate.”
In another video on the day of the surgery, Zarrilli Doyen asked her husband while they drove to Boston: “Do you feel like getting a new kidney while we’re here?”
“Sure,” Doyen deadpans.
‘My calling is to help others’
There were more than 27,000 kidney transplants performed in 2023 in the U.S., with about 7,000 of those coming from a live donor, according to the latest federal data. Maine Medical Center is the only hospital that does kidney transplants in Maine and 14 were done there in 2025, according to hospital data.
Nationwide, nearly 90,000 people were on the wait list for a kidney in 2023, according to the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration.
Dr. Jamil Azzi, director of the kidney transplant program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said in an interview that the need is far greater than the supply of donations — patients can wait up to seven years to receive a transplant. He said the voucher system provides flexibility by giving people who aren’t matches an incentive to donate.
Azzi said Konchalski’s donation is “an amazing act of love to humanity.”
Azzi did not perform Doyen’s surgery, but he has been involved in Doyen’s care, both before and after the surgery. He said Doyen’s surgery went well.
“It was a very uncomplicated, successful surgery,” Azzi said. “There are no concerns and I expect him to have a very nice recovery.”
Azzi said Doyen was a good candidate to receive a kidney transplant.
“He’s a remarkably strong patient,” Azzi said. “He’s had many complications in his life, but in evaluating him for the surgery we noted that he takes great care of himself. I thought ‘You know what, he will be able to get through this.’”
After the surgery, in a video posted by Zarrilli Doyen, the couple smiled for the camera as Doyen walked slowly down the hospital hallway.
Konchalski said she’s glad she helped and to know he is doing well.
“My calling is to help others,” she said. “I just like seeing other people happy. With everything going on in the world going on right now, I try to be a light in the darkness.”
Zarrilli Doyen said she’s so inspired by Konchalski, it has made her think about donating a kidney in the future or “some other way to pay it forward.” She said it’s “surreal” to think her husband’s ordeal may be over.
Doyen, who is a loan officer for the agricultural industry, said he has gotten through his health problems by staying positive and motivated.
“As bad as I’ve been, I’ve never felt no hope,” he said. “I’ve always felt I could get through it.”
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Joe Lawlor can be reached at [email protected].
