Tony Aitoro was enjoying a well-deserved vacation with his family 35 years ago, when his mother-in-law, a nurse, said she was worried about him.
“She looked over and said, ‘You’re drinking water constantly,’” the Norwalk appliance store owner remembers. “I think you have diabetes.”
Turns out her concern was well-founded. Not only did Aitoro have Type 2 diabetes, but last fall, he got some related news that rocked his world. “I worked on the diabetes over the years, but it started getting worse and worse and worse,” he says. “My doctor said if it kept up I would have kidney failure. I went to NYU and they said, ‘you’re going to need a new kidney.’ I almost died. I was so surprised.”
From there, things started to move at lightning speed. Soon he was at Yale New Haven Hospital undergoing a battery of tests and consultations. In came a social worker, an anesthetist, a psychologist, and a surgical team. They were all professional and caring, but the message was clear: Tony needed a new kidney, or he had only three to five years to live. And he would need to join a waitlist of about 110,000 people.
“What happens if you don’t get one?” he recalls asking. “They said, ‘People die. Do you know many people? Start asking around for donors.’”
Stunned, Tony called a friend who works in public relations in Hollywood. The pair crafted a poignant letter he could address to his 6,500 friends on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
On June 27, 2024, they hit send.
At her home in Long Beach Island, N.J., Maureen Hickey Hines was scrolling on her phone. Having retired from teaching preschool at Christ and Holy Trinity School in Westport, she and her husband Jim, were enjoying their days reading and playing pickleball. She saw a long post from Tony Aitoro, a longtime family friend, and stopped to read it.
“I wondered 'what’s that about?' Tony’s a man of few words in his posts,” Maureen says. “Then I read it and I was, like, holy cow. I immediately thought 'I have to see if I can help.' I told my husband and he said, ‘Of course.’”
Maureen was one of a dozen people who answered Tony's plea on the first day it was posted, and it’s easy to see why. Since 1972, he’s been working at his 77-year-old Norwalk family business, Aitoro Appliance, finding perfect refrigerators, clothes dryers, and dishwashers for families across Fairfield County, just like his father Vincent and grandfather Anthony before him.
In addition to being a trusted businessman, Aitoro has a long history of giving back to the community, most notably offering up the Aitoro Showroom for an annual Make-a-Wish Foundation event with celebrity chefs and youngsters with life-threatening illnesses.
“I have an appliance store, but I don’t just sell dishwashers if you know what I mean,” says Tony, 67. “We do something with charities every month. It’s what I do. I’m a giver.”
This time around, Tony would be on the receiving end – but not before Maureen went through her own set of tests, including an EKG, 24-hour urinalysis, a stress test, a CAT scan, and a conversation about being psychologically ready to donate an organ. (She appreciated the added bonus of knowing she was in optimal shape.)
The Yale team pronounced Maureen, 58, a compatible donor. If the surgery was successful, they told her, it could add 20 years to Tony's life.
“Good health is the most important thing you can have and I had an opportunity to share that with a really remarkable person,” she tells Westport Lifestyle.
On September 24, Maureen and Tony lay in adjacent operating rooms. The team removed Maureen's kidney and carried it “in a salad bowl,” says Tony with a laugh, across the hall to the other operating suite. When he woke up in the recovery room, Jim was there with Tony’s wife, Liz, and two of his three grown children, Caroline, A.J., and Michael.
Within 48 hours, the high creatinine levels in his body that had doctors concerned he would need dialysis to live had plummeted down to the normal range. He was in the hospital for three days and was back to the store, with reduced workdays, the following month.
“I’m on 27 pills a day right now, but that’s OK,” Tony says.
For Maureen, the experience is an example of the beauty of life.
“The world can sometimes feel like a dark place,” she says, her voice quavering. “I can’t even describe how happy I was afterward. How grateful.”
For Tony Aitoro, it was an answer to many prayers. As fall turned into the holiday season, he said he knew he was on the mend when his wife and daughter felt comfortable enough to go on vacation, leaving him to rest at home by himself for a week.
“My wife has been a rock. I can’t say it enough. And my kids,” he says. “But Maureen? She’s an angel. She really is.”