An 'Angel On Earth' Pastor's gift saves teen
By Alfonso A. Castillo
STAFF WRITER//Newdsay
July 27, 2003
On the Feast Day of St. Paraskevi, inside the church that bears her name, the Very Rev. John Heropoulos talked about the Greek Orthodox patron saint of eyesight.
"She changed the world," said Heropoulos, adding the saint dedicated her life to the less fortunate.
Sitting in the front pews of the filled-to-capacity church, Demetris and Anna Dermos understood the importance of the saint's cause all too well. Their 16-year-old son is alive because a man, who months ago they didn't know, donated a kidney.
Demetris Dermos remembers driving his son Michael to the Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack, N.J., on the morning of May 12.
He was meeting possibly the most important person ever to come into his life, a person he knew almost nothing about. His first name was John, and "he was Michael's angel on Earth," medical officials told him.
"I'm driving, taking him to the hospital, and I said to my wife, 'Who is this person? This John?'" Demetris Dermos, 50, of West Nyack, said. "Is he going to be there?"
John was there, and after enduring a six-hour operation, he donated the organ to Michael, who suffered from a rare disease that destroyed both of his kidneys. After the transplant proved successful, Demetris Dermos said he and his family felt closer to God. They would find out later that they were closer than they imagined.
The mysterious John was actually "Father John" Heropoulos, the Greenlawn pastor who learned that Michael had been diagnosed last year with Alport's Syndrome, a kidney disease that affects about one in 5,000 and, without a transplant, can be terminal.
When Michael's parents, brother, sister and several friends tested negative as donors, the Dermoses went to their local parish, the St. Constantine & Helen Church of West Nyack, which spread word of Michael's illness to Greek Orthodox churches throughout the state.
Michael knew the odds were slim. "All he kept saying was, 'There's nobody out there for me,'" his mother, Anna, 44, said.
Because Heropoulos shared Michael's rare blood type of O-negative, he tested to learn if he was a match. After months of tests, Heropoulos was confirmed, and was more than willing to go though with the procedure.
Three days after the surgery, the Dermos family met Heropoulos for the first time, as he was rolled in by wheelchair to meet them inside the hospital. "The first thing that started was tears in our eyes, because we didn't know how to thank him," Demetris Dermos said. "What kind of words do you say to thank him for what he had done? The bottom line is he saved my son's life."
Heropoulos said he needed no thanks, and that he never hesitated in making his decision, nor did he regret it during the difficult recovery period, which he called "the most intense pain I ever felt in my life."
"My daily faith in God took away the need to make a decision," Heropoulos said. "Anytime that it hurt at all, I said, 'Eight weeks of pain in exchange for a lifetime of good health for a young man.' It's a no-brainer."
Yesterday, the Dermoses reunited with the man Michael's sister Anna Marie calls "the sixth member of our family," as they visited Heropoulos for yesterday's holy day services.
With an arm around the teen he nicknamed "The Kidney Kid," Heropoulos delivered a simple message.
"Life is good," he said, "Life is a very beautiful thing."