Niamh Shackleton
A pizzeria owner ended up saving one of his customer's lives with a simple social media post.
Mark Iacono owns Brooklyn-based pizzeria Lucali; an eatery that's been hailed as 'one of the best in the area', according to some.
Dozens of celebrities have been to the restaurant, including Ed Sheeran, David Beckham, Jimmy Fallon and Paul McCartney.
Theo Alano is also a frequent customer at the pizza joint and fell seriously ill with COVID in 2022.
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Theo's heath rapidly deteriorated and last year and he was told that he was dying from kidney failure.
His condition was so severe that a nurse told one of Theo's friends who had rushed him to the emergency room that he only had an hour to live, Alano told The New York Post.
Fortunately, thanks to dialysis, Theo survived. To keep him alive, he had to undergo three four-hour sessions of dialysis a week.
The long term hope for him was getting a new kidney for a kind-hearted donor, but there's a 10-year waiting list for one through New York State Donate Life Registry, New York Post reports.
Desperate to come off dialysis and find his own donor, Theo took to Instagram to share a plea.
And pizzeria owner Mark happened across the call to action and went on to share it to his own 246,000 Instagram followers.
It's here that Rusty Rastello - a longtime Lucali fan - happened upon the post an learnt of Theo's health woes.
Theo's story resonated with Rusty as 32 years prior, his own uncle, whom he saw as a father figure, donated his kidney to his brother.
He immediately starting looking into kidney donations and went on to meet up with Theo in December 2023.
While they were complete strangers, Theo said that it 'was as if [he] had known him for years'.
Rusty went on to undergo a series of tests to see if he was a match for Theo and, by means of a miracle, he was.
The news was confirmed in May 2024 and the pair both went under the knife in August.
Rusty's surgery took just three hours, while Theo's was a more complicated procedure lasting six hours.
He recalled the moment he learned that his kidney had taken to Theo and how emotional it made him.
"I just started crying. I still don’t even know what that emotion was – it was somewhere between relief and excitement," he said.
"We had become friends at this point and it was an immense amount of gratitude that we both came through it. When I saw him — light had come to his eyes, color to his face. It was remarkable how quickly he recovered."
They were both discharged from hospital within days and are both recovering well.
Now Theo and Rusty are firm friends - all through the help of Lucali owner Mark.