A 21-year-old woman who underwent a double-lung transplant after using social media to find a potential donor has confirmed that she's out of the hospital.
"Got discharged, I'm back at home away from home in Toronto, casa at lasta," she wrote Friday in a message posted to her Twitter feed.
Helene Campbell was diagnosed with advanced idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis last September, and received the transplant at Toronto General Hospital on April 6.
The student first got her message out about the need for organ donors when she sent a tweet to Justin Bieber asking him to spread the word. He re-tweeted it to his more than 16 million followers.
When she then sent in a video to the Ellen DeGeneres TV show about the need for organ donations, DeGeneres put her on her show through a Skype interview. DeGeneres said she was moved by Campbell's story and invited her to return to the show after the lung transplant.
Campbell's Twitter account has since garnered more than 14,000 followers and people from around the world have been following updates on her blog and cheering her on.
As a result provinces have seen a huge jump in the number of people pledging to donate organs. The president of Ontario's organ and tissue donation agency, the Trillium Gift of Life Network, said after Bieber and DeGeneres got involved the number of new organ registrations has spiked to 3,000 from 350 a week, The Canadian Press reports.
Campbell's illness, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, is a type of progressive lung disease that comes on suddenly from unknown causes.
With a report from CTV medical specialist Avis Favaro
