When Debbie Lundberg was getting her driver’s license, she did something that surprised her parents: she wanted to sign up as an organ donor.
She was young. She wasn’t facing a health crisis. She hadn’t studied medical school or worked in healthcare. She just thought: Of course that’s what I would want to do.
Her mom, a nurse, and her brother pushed back. The whole conversation felt foreign to them. How could someone so young be thinking about donating an organ? It didn’t make sense.
But Debbie held onto that impulse. It stayed with her through high school, through building a successful coaching and speaking business, through marriage and life.
And then, one evening about fifteen years ago, everything crystallized. She was standing in the operating room at Tampa General Hospital, on a stool because she’s only five foot two, watching surgeons remove a 23-year-old woman’s damaged lungs and replace them with new ones. She was asked twice if she needed to step down because she was visibly emotional.
“Those new lungs,” she recalls, “when they took the old lungs out, they were small and dark. And when they brought this gift of life, they looked like angel wings to me. They looked white, they looked big and beautiful.”
In that moment, standing in an operating room watching a life be saved, Debbie’s childhood impulse—the one her parents had questioned—became a calling.
The White Coat Program: When a Hospital Invites You Inside
Debbie’s story of becoming an advocate is unusual because it doesn’t start with illness or crisis.
It starts with recognition.
Tampa General Hospital reached out to her, a community leader, someone active in the area, and invited her to participate in their White Coat internship program. It’s an exclusive experience where community leaders get paired with a doctor or surgeon, shadow them for a day, wear scrubs and a white coat with their name on it, and see the real work of a teaching hospital.
On the day Debbie participated, the cardiologist she was paired with spent time asking her what she wanted to see. After rounds and surgeries and family conversations, he said: “I’ve got to find something sexy for an hour.”
Debbie laughed and asked what a cardiologist thinks is sexy.
“A lung transplant,” he said.
What happened in that operating room became the moment that transformed Debbie from someone with a childhood impulse into someone with a mission. She watched new life enter a body that had been slowly suffocating. She felt the weight of it. She understood, viscerally, what organ donation meant.
Nearly ten years later, when she learned about the thousands of people dying every year waiting for transplants, something shifted. She decided to get tested. She was approved. And then COVID hit, and everything paused.
But Debbie didn’t wait.
The Pandemic Gift: Donating Alone, Together
In February 2020, Debbie was tested to become a living kidney donor. In early March, while she and her husband Michael were in California golfing with her aunt and uncle, she got the call: she was approved.
Then they flew back. COVID shut down the country.
Debbie was told she could opt out if she wanted. People were dying. The hospital was overwhelmed. No one would blame her for waiting.
She asked: “But aren’t people still going to die?”
She went through with it.
What followed was a profoundly lonely experience in a moment of profound connection. Because of COVID restrictions, Michael couldn’t attend a single appointment with her. He didn’t meet her coordinator or her surgeon. He couldn’t accompany her in the hospital or wait inside with her. He had to drop her off at the entrance and drive away.
For both of them, that isolation was strange. But Michael found a way to show up differently.
He had people send her cards, over a hundred of them. He got them to her transplant coordinator, Candace, who snuck them into Debbie’s hospital room so that when she woke up after surgery, she could open them and feel comforted by voices and love even though no one could visit in person.
Debbie recovered quickly. After about 28 hours in the hospital, she was ready to go home with one kidney. And Michael made a decision: he would become a kidney donor too.
Not because Debbie pressured him. Not because he felt obligated. But because he had heard their surgeon, Dr. Wong, speak about the statistics. And something clicked. He saw the need. He decided to do it.
“He’s the cutest copycat you’ll ever meet,” Debbie laughs.
Michael’s process was faster because he already knew what to expect. He went through testing quickly. And a couple of years later, when COVID restrictions eased, he had his surgery.
Now they call themselves “two one beaners”—a couple who each have one kidney. And they’re part of an extraordinarily small group: couples who both donated kidneys, not to each other, but to strangers in the donation chain.
Angel Wings and Beyond: When Your Donor Life Becomes Your Identity
Here’s something unexpected about Debbie and Michael’s journey: neither of them knows the person who received Debbie’s kidney. They have no relationship. It was a chain donation, and the kidney went where it was needed, to someone they’ve never met.
But Michael’s kidney went to someone who has become part of their lives. Someone who hugs Michael in public and tells him: “The only thing we had planned was my husband’s funeral. Now they’ve had over five years of amazing life together.”
Those are very different experiences. And Debbie learned something crucial from the Kidney Donor Athletes community (an organization of over a thousand donor-athletes, where she became immediately active): you can’t control what relationship, if any, you’ll have with your recipient.
Some donors don’t want to meet their recipients because they’re afraid that if complications arise, they’ll feel responsible. Some recipients don’t want to meet donors because they’re processing their own trauma. Some become like family. Some remain beautiful strangers.
“You can’t have in your mind what you’d like the relationship to be,” Debbie explains. “Because you may not know the recipient. You might know them, but you don’t have anything in common. Or they might not want to meet you if you’re altruistic. So there’s all this stuff that I don’t know. I had this fantasy, I might go running with this person and that didn’t happen and it’s never going to happen. And that’s all okay, because back to your question about advocacy, if you do it for the right reason, no matter how it shakes out, it’s how it’s supposed to be.”
That’s a profound wisdom: the gift isn’t about the relationship it creates. It’s about the life it saves.
Turning Tragedy Into Advocacy
A couple of years after their surgeries, Debbie and Michael experienced something most of us would consider catastrophic: they lost their home in a hurricane. Everything except the clothes on their backs was gone.
Most people, faced with that loss, would understandably go into survival mode. Debbie and Michael did something different. They turned their loss into action.
They organized a fundraiser where people could literally throw bricks through the windows of their destroyed home. Every brick thrown raised money. All the proceeds went to charity—the National Kidney Foundation’s Kidney Walk, the Crisis Center, the University of South Florida’s Women in Leadership and Philanthropy scholarship program.
They were over 600 days without a permanent home. And instead of focusing on their own loss, they focused on creating something bigger than their suffering.
“We may not have much at times,” Debbie says, “but if someone else can use it more, we’re going to give it to them.”
This isn’t noble suffering. It’s not toxic positivity. It’s a clear-eyed choice: We can sit and sulk and wait, or we can take action and create a new environment.
They chose action. Together.
The Hospital Council: Understanding Patient Experience From the Other Side
One of Debbie’s most impactful roles is serving on Tampa General Hospital’s Patient and Family Advisory Council (PFAC). What’s remarkable is that she’s there not as a patient, but as a living donor.
Being on this council has given her a window into the entire patient experience at the hospital—cancer care, neonatal services, heart and lung and liver transplants, emergency departments. She and Michael even co-chaired the transplant division.
But what she’s learned goes beyond the specifics of medical care. She’s learned something fundamental about hospitals:
“There are only two types of people who check into a hospital, really happy living organ donors and people who are going to have healthy babies. But everyone else goes into a hospital and they’re scared or they’re nervous or they’re at least apprehensive because not a lot of it is elective in a hospital.”
This understanding has shaped how she thinks about advocacy and healthcare. When she speaks to nurses, techs, doctors, and hospital staff, she says: “You’re meeting people who aren’t at their best. So thank you for giving us your best.”
It’s a simple reframing. A reminder that healthcare workers aren’t just treating conditions, they’re caring for people at vulnerable moments. And that matters.
Debbie’s Definition of Advocacy: Kindness Without Expectation
When Debbie defines advocacy, she cuts through a lot of noise.
“Advocacy is whatever you can do that can assist someone else, whether they know that you’ve done it or not. I associate advocacy a lot with kindness.”
She goes further: “I encourage people to be kindly direct and directly kind. If you do something for someone and you expect something in return, that’s like a business relationship that’s not really kindness. And if you expect people to give you accolades for it, that’s a bit of showmanship.”
Real advocacy, in Debbie’s view, comes from a place of genuine wanting to help. It doesn’t come with strings attached. It doesn’t demand recognition.
This is radically different from how we often think about advocacy. We imagine activists with megaphones, patients testifying before Congress, campaigns fighting for policy change. And all of that matters.
But Debbie’s vision of advocacy is quieter. It’s about the woman who mentors over 20 people who want to become organ donors. It’s about sitting on a hospital council and quietly insisting that patient voices are heard when a new building is being designed. It’s about throwing fundraisers after losing everything.
It’s about doing good because it’s good.
The Dream: Planting Seeds Across America
If resources were no object, what would Debbie do?
She’d travel to middle schools, high schools, and colleges across the country. She’d talk about the power of organ donation. She’d show healthy, thriving people who have donated kidneys and livers and parts of their livers. She’d explain what actually happens in organ donation, dispelling myths and fears.
Because here’s what people don’t understand: some people refuse to become donors because they believe hospitals will let them die to harvest their organs. They think being a donor means less care. It’s a myth, but it’s a powerful one that costs lives.
Debbie wants to plant the seed of donation early. She wants young people to see real donors, healthy people who’ve gone on to run marathons and play sports and live full lives. She wants them to understand the process. She wants them, when they turn 18, to make an informed choice to sign up.
“That can make the difference in people living or dying,” she says.
The Pattern: Converting Circumstance Into Community Action
What strikes me most about Debbie’s story is the pattern: she has a remarkable ability to take personal circumstances—a white coat program, a lung transplant, kidney donation, a hurricane, loss—and convert them into community action.
Is this a philosophy? A coping mechanism? A bit of both?
Debbie suggests it’s all of the above. But it’s also a choice. Again and again, she and Michael have chosen action over passivity, purpose over despair, community over isolation.
When they lost their home, they could have withdrawn. Instead, they threw a brick-smashing fundraiser.
When Debbie decided to donate a kidney during a pandemic when hospitals were overwhelmed, she could have waited. Instead, she asked: “But aren’t people still going to die?”
When Michael heard statistics about how many people needed transplants, he didn’t think about his own safety or comfort. He thought about need. He decided to help.
This is what real advocacy looks like, Debbie suggests: not as a grand gesture or a career, but as a pattern of choosing compassion when you could choose comfort.
Connect With Debbie
If you want to learn more about Debbie’s work:
Website: Presenting Powerfully (for her coaching and speaking work)
Social Media: Search “Debbie Lundberg” on TikTok, LinkedIn, and other platforms
Kidney Donor Athletes: An incredible community for living kidney donors (thousands of members, with transplant games and ongoing support)
Donate Life: If you want to become an organ donor, sign up through DonateLife.net
Tampa General Hospital Patient & Family Advisory Council: If you’re interested in having a voice in hospital policy and design
Final Thoughts
Debbie Lundberg’s story is a reminder that advocacy doesn’t require a crisis diagnosis. You don’t have to be a patient to be an advocate. You don’t have to be angry at a system to want to change it.
Sometimes advocacy starts with a young person at a DMV counter thinking, Of course that’s what I would want to do.
Sometimes it’s a moment in an operating room watching angel wings come to life.
Sometimes it’s a choice to ask, What if I could help? And then actually doing it.
Debbie’s lived kidney donation from a place of abundance, not scarcity. From a place of asking who needs this more than I do? rather than what will I get in return?
And in doing that, she’s shown that advocacy isn’t just about fighting for laws to change. It’s about choosing kindness repeatedly, in small and large ways, until it becomes a pattern that shapes your entire life.
That pattern, multiplied across the country, across all of us asking what we can give instead of what we can get, could literally save lives.
“Plant that seed much sooner and much wider,” Debbie says about organ donation education.
But she could be talking about advocacy itself. Plant the seed. Show up. Choose compassion. See what grows.
Are you interested in becoming an organ donor? Visit DonateLife.net. If you’re already a donor and want community and support, Kidney Donor Athletes is waiting for you. And if you’re inspired by Debbie’s approach to turning hardship into purpose, ask yourself: what circumstance in my life could become an opportunity to help someone else?
