Thomas Chappell doesn’t look like he’s had some of his life’s highest highs and lowest lows in the past few months. He doesn’t look like an activist, or a decorated hero, or an organ donor. He looks, at first glance, like his job title would describe him—a veteran taxi driver.

But Chappell, who has tried for much of his life to see the stories behind first appearances, turns out to have a hefty one of his own.

Before it all started, Chappell, 56, of Phoenix, was doing fine. His job as a cab driver for VIP Taxi Service kept him busy for up to 18 hours a day, and he almost always found his way to charges’ locations with no problem. But he was missing something, and not just the occasional turn.

There were a few missed turns, though, which is really what started the whole thing. Last summer, Chappell was late picking up a charge—and she was less than pleased.

“Yeah, she was pretty mad,” Chappell recalls.

His charge was Rita Van Loenen.

“Well, I mean, he’s a cab driver,” Van Loenen says. “They’re supposed to know their way. And here he was half an hour late, and then he goes the wrong way turning off my street. I’m like, come on, man!”

She didn’t tip him. To their chagrin, the next time Van Loenen needed a ride—and the next, and the next—Chappell was dispatched to her house, her demeanor not improving.

Rather than weasel out of the next pickup, Chappell decided to get to the bottom of it. He wasn’t missing that many turns.

“Instead of getting mad, I figured maybe there’s a reason she’s upset,” Chappell said. He thought reason might have something to do with the door where he left Van Loenen each time—the one marked “dialysis.”

It turns out that it had everything to do with the destination. Dialysis, by all accounts, is a lousy experience. It’s physically and emotionally draining, takes several hours at a time, and can cause everything from intense itching to cramping and vomiting to blood pressure problems, infection and clotting.

“Everyone reacts differently, and sometimes it’s different for me than other times,” Van Loenen says. “It impacts your whole body. I’m always so tense, you never know what’s going to happen, and they have this warehouse setup to get (all the dialysis patients) through each day. There are screaming machines, alarms beeping. Sometimes I cramp up real bad or vomit. Sometimes I cry. I just want to get there and get it over with. So I wasn’t too happy with him. I’m crabby when I have to go to dialysis.”

“I went to the library and started learning more, and I started to understand why she was the way she was,” Chappell says. “I knew it had to be something, because there was an energy about her. I knew there was something real good inside of her.”

Chappell says he can sense energy. He claims that just by being around someone, or being somewhere, he can feel what’s going on.

“I had it in the Army, in ‘Nam,” he says. “If you can see the energy things give off, a blind man could walk through a minefield and not get hit.”

On Van Loenen, “I knew she had more to do in her life, that she could do a lot of good. And I knew we were a good match. Our energies mixed somehow,” Chappell says.

The Army’s de-mining process might not include “energy sensing” in its official repertoire, but Chappell turned out to be right in the case of Van Loenen.

The two formed an unlikely, but close, friendship. He learned that Van Loenen worked with autistic and other special-needs children for years, and now teaches others to do the same.

“Or, at least I was teaching classes,” she told Chappell. “I’m on leave now. It’s on my list to do, once I have my kidney.”

Chappell read more and talked to Van Loenen about dialysis, and found this is a common way to think about kidney failure: Dialysis isn’t a permanent solution. For many, it’s “once I have my kidney” or no real life at all.

Chappell was right about their match too. Chappell asked about Van Loenen’s quest to find a new kidney. He learned that all her family and friends who could be tested had been, and the only match, her cousin Sandy Keleman, had donated a kidney to Van Loenen last spring. The transplant went smoothly, but the new kidney just didn’t work in Van Loenen’s body. She jokes that her “strong German system” kicked it out.

But it was a blow. The only relative left was Van Loenen’s 26-year-old son, and because he had just received his economics degree and was about to go off student health insurance—and was his mother’s primary caregiver—the family felt stuck.

“So I went home one night, and was taking a shower and me and the Lord had a talk,” Chappell said matter-of-factly. “He said, ‘Tom, you give it to her.’ And so I said I would.”

At first, Van Loenen didn’t believe him.

“I’m like, ‘Okay, sure, buddy.’ Other people have asked me to give them the number (to call to get tested) before, and it never went anywhere. I had the number memorized, so I gave it to him.”

She was taken aback when he really did go to the Mayo Clinic to get tested—and even more shocked when they ended up being an almost-perfect match.

“It’s amazing enough that a perfect stranger would offer,” she said. “And then to be a perfect match, as good as a sibling? It’s just too good.”

From there, the process began. Chappell went through extensive testing. If blood types are compatible, potential donors undergo medical-history reviews and psychological and physical exams including blood and urine tests, X-rays, electrocardiograms, and tests for blood-pressure problems and conditions like diabetes or heart disease.

“Basically, anything at all,” Chappell said. “It was the first time I’d been to the doctor in years, and boy, if there’s anything to find out about you, they’ll find it. They took blood and other stuff. They poked and prodded me. Two weeks of going in every day for something.”

He lost several pounds during the testing, but it was worth it. Doctors couldn’t find any reason not to perform the transplant.

“Everything was falling into place. I’d seen her through bad and then through worse, and now I knew I was going to help fix her. I’d tell her, ‘It ain’t gonna be long, Rita. You’re gonna be fixed. We’re gonna get you back to your life,’” he says.

Van Loenen said the light at the end of the tunnel “really lifted my spirits.” Having the transplant ahead, having the promise of a new kidney and a new life, invigorated her.

It helped Chappell too. It’s hard to imagine someone excited about the removal of an organ, but he was ecstatic.

“I was going to be able to give someone life,” he said. “Try not to get a lift in your boots about that. It’s one hell of a high.”

Already a nationally recognized hero by mid-September, Chappell traveled with his supervisor to New York to attend the International Association of Transportation Regulators annual banquet, which honors taxi drivers from around the world.

Chappell was presented there with the award for International Driver of the Year for his generosity and inspirational story. He looks a little shell-shocked, a little out of place in the photo he has from the evening. Surrounded by the incoming and outgoing IATR presidents and the national sales and marketing director for the company that owns VIP Taxi, all wearing suits and confident smiles, Chappell holds a corner of his award and is the only man in the photo wearing a baseball cap. He looks a little surprised to find himself there.

“I was on top of the world, though,” he recalls. “I was as high as you can get.”

Chappell received a standing ovation from the entire room. He had an Escalade and chauffer waiting to drive him around New York City. While on tour, he stopped at Ground Zero, where firefighters saw him and pulled him into a group shot. He was the hero this day. A NYPD officer gave Chappell the shield of his brother, an officer who died on September 11.

When the story of his generosity hit the news, Chappell became known around the world, but one bit of recognition hit him much harder than the rest. He got a call one evening from a woman in Kentucky who had seen his story.

“And she said ... she said, ‘This is your daughter,’” Chappell said, blinking away tears. “And I just fell to my knees.”

Chappell hadn’t seen his daughter, Aimee Requena—who turned 36 the day she called—in over 30 years.

“For six years, we were so close, then she was just gone,” Chappell said. He said after an ugly divorce, his wife took their daughter—and that was the last he saw of her.

“All I could do was cry for a long time,” he said of the phone call. “She had to calm me down. She kept saying, ‘Daddy, it’s okay.’”

Chappell said he talks to his daughter nearly every night now. He went to visit her in Kentucky, worried that he and Requena might not recognize each other. But that wasn’t the case.

“We knew each other right away,” he said. “It was like two magnets coming together.”

 “I would have given my whole body just to see her again, and all it cost me was a kidney. That’s a pretty good deal,” Chappell says.

With his reunion with Requena, a single mother and cashier, Chappell gained three grandkids—two grandsons, 8 and 10, and a 16-year-old granddaughter.

After a visit that was “way too short,” Chappell continued on to Phoenix. But he wasn’t too down about it. The transplant was coming up. When he got back home, Mayo Clinic had left him a message to come in. Looking forward to setting the date, he went in the next day.

“And that’s when it all came crashing down. I came crashing down,” he said.

The Mayo Clinic had wanted him to come in so they could tell him in person: He would not be able to give Van Loenen his kidney.

“Tom Chappell’s heart was in the right place. It’s just a matter of his kidneys,” Mayo Clinic tactfully put in their release praising his generosity. Chappell’s much harder on himself. It’s not the kidneys, he says.

“I smoked too long,” he says, thumping his chest with one fist. “I stopped for a month beforehand, but they’re worried something could happen.”

He was the one to call Van Loenen with the good news that he’d be able to donate, and Chappell was the one who made the hard phone call to tell her it was off, too.

“I understand the folks at Mayo spent like an hour and a half talking to him. I thought that was really nice. Tom’s taking this harder than I am,” Van Loenen says. “He really does have a heart of gold.”

She might well have added, “and a head of granite.” Chappell agrees that they spent about an hour and a half at Mayo discussing the transplant, but insists it was just because they wouldn’t budge when he assured them he’d be fine.

Unfortunately, reassurances that he was “healthy as a boar hog” and could “sweat it out with a hot toddy” did little to sway Mayo doctors, who repeatedly reminded him, “donor safety and the safety of our recipient is our main goal.”

“I know myself,” Chappell persisted. “I know I would be okay. I can’t see throwing away this chance because of a maybe. But they’re worried about how it would look if I got all this media attention and then something happened. I told them it doesn’t matter, but they won’t risk it. They’re worried about killing me, but they might as well have killed me right then.”

“He probably would have made it,” Van Loenen sighed, “knowing him. But I totally understand their policy. I am discouraged. I’m disappointed. But somehow, I know it will all work out.”

Van Loenen points to all the bonuses that have come from that first chance encounter. She’s encouraged Chappell. He’s supported and energized her. Chappell found his daughter and grandchildren. Van Loenen’s son just started dating her nurse. After it came out that Chappell would be unable to donate a kidney, other donors have come forward to be tested, though no matches have been found.

Today, Chappell has made it his mission to help find Van Loenen a kidney. Chappell has become something of an organ-donation evangelist since then. He’s been told time and again that he’s “one in a million.” And he hates that.

“Well, I mean, sure, it feels good,” he said. “But why don’t more people come out? It’s not dangerous. And they could save lives.”

About one in four people willing to be an organ donor is compatible enough to proceed with the process, according to Mayo Clinic.

Even so, Chappell says, “there’s millions of kidneys just walking around. If even some of those people volunteered, we’d have plenty.” He insists that if more people knew about the possibility of living organ donation, and the low risk involved, they’d be lining up.

“There wouldn’t be a waiting list. I don’t know why more people don’t talk about it. There’s so little awareness, and people are dying.”

Van Loenen and the Mayo Clinic continue to praise Chappell for the awareness he has brought to organ donation, but he still regrets being unable to donate himself.

“I’ve never gotten to do anything real big in my life,” he says. “I think everyone’s complete if they can just do one big thing in their life, you know? And this... this was my big thing. It just didn’t go the way I wanted.”