Leslie's father Eddie pictured above before and after the liver transplant. (PHOTOS: Leslie Tan)

SINGAPORE — Eddie Tan was facing a critical health situation as his liver was failing, but a successful public appeal started by his son has given him a new lease of life.

The 59-year-old former project manager received the lifeline from a complete stranger just eight days after his 24-year-old son Leslie posted the appeal on Facebook calling for liver donors to help his father.

On 30 May, Tan received the liver transplant following a gruelling eight-hour operation at the National University Hospital (NUH)’s National University Centre for Organ Transplantation (NUCOT).

His saviour was fellow Singaporean Lin Hanwei, 36, a financial services director with AXA Insurance, who separately underwent an operation for five and a half hours.

The spirit of selfless giving runs in the Lin family. Seven years earlier, Lin’s younger brother, now 34, had also donated his kidney to a complete stranger at the same hospital.

When approached for an interview, Lin declined to speak to Yahoo News Singapore as he is currently recuperating from the operation.

Leslie said he was surprised and humbled not just by Lin’s gift of life, but also by the number of strangers who offered to donate their livers.

Over 50 people volunteered to be donors after reading about his father’s plight detailed in a Facebook post uploaded on 22 May, said the Nanyang Technological University final-year student.

View photos The appeal for a liver donor posted on a Facebook page has since been taken down. (Screencap of Leslie's post) More

Scepticism about social media appeal

Leslie admitted that he had initial misgivings about posting the appeal on social media. “I was unsure about finding any donors through this way,” he said.

He also thought to himself, “How likely was it that someone would go this far for a complete stranger?”

He posted the public appeal as a last resort as Tan’s liver had deteriorated drastically due to a worsening chronic hepatitis B infection. A donor had to be found within a week from the posting to ensure Tan’s best chance of survival.

The dire situation was indicated by Leslie’s updates to his post. On his father’s condition, he wrote, “10 litres of water was trapped within the body cavity. He cannot eat, cannot drink, cannot sleep, and he is in perpetual distress and pain.”

Associate professor Alfred Kow, a liver transplantation senior consultant at the NUCOT who was part of a team that operated on the donor, said the chance of finding a suitable donor is about one in three.

“This estimate is very much dependent on the blood group match, body weight match, size of the liver, quality of the liver – for example, whether the potential donor has fatty liver – and anatomical structures of the liver,” he added.

All prospective donors have to go through a series of blood tests and scans to ensure that they are physically healthy and will not be harmed through the act of donation. They have to attend a mandatory counselling session and be evaluated by an independent transplant ethics committee, which will decide if a transplant can take place.

Before the successful appeal, the Tans knew they were racing against time as both immediate and extended family members, including Leslie and his elder sister, shared different blood types from their father: A+ or AB+ to Tan’s O+.

“We looked up the Internet and saw that there was a new incompatible blood type transplant pioneered by the Singapore General Hospital,” said Leslie. “However, given the delicate state my father was in, we were told that this technique would be difficult and risky to execute.”

View photos File photo of a living donor transplant operation. (Getty Images file photo) More

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