VIEW SLIDESHOW OF RYAN AND KOURTNEY
"Every night, I would pray that I would wake up the next morning," Malloy said.
He was just 20 years old when he was diagnosed with Goodpasture Disease - a rare illness that shuts down the kidneys and fills the lungs with blood.
Malloy needed a kidney, but no one in his immediate family was a match.
"As a mother, I was in a dark place. You usually can kiss your kids boo-boo's away, and I couldn't make this go away," Malloy's mom, Angie Hernandez, said.
Two months after renal-kidney failure, Ryan was put on the donor list for a kidney, but the wait was three to four years.
Three years went by, and Ryan was having a tough go. He had been admitted to the hospital more than 70 times, had three heart attacks, a stroke and was on dialysis and blood transfusions 10 to 12 hours every day.
"By the third year, [Ryan] said he wasn't going to make it another year. He was fighting but his body was giving up. I knew I had to figure out something. I had to save my son," Hernendez said. "That's when I decided to go on Facebook."
Hernandez made a video of Ryan and uploaded to Facebook:
"I asked my friends, each one individually, if they could post the video on Facebook on Dec. 21, 2010 and ask their friends to do the same," Hernendez said.
Hernandez estimates that on that day, close to 300,000 people saw Ryan's video.
Ten people immediately came forward to donate to him, but all of them turned out not to be a match.
"Two days after everybody sent the video out on Facebook, I got a phone call. It was my sister that I hadn't spoken to in 10 years. She asked me how Ryan was doing," Hernandez said.
"I just happened to be on Facebook one day, and I saw a picture of my nephew, and he was in a coma, and it was a heart-breaking picture. I called my brother and I said 'What's wrong with Ryan?' He said 'He's sick, both of his kidneys have failed,' and I said 'Sign me up, give me the information, I want to help," Kourtney Wagner, Hernandez's sister and Malloy's aunt said.
Within a few days, they were in the hospital getting testing done. Turns out, Malloy was a perfect match and the surgery was scheduled for Nov. 15, 2011.
According to the National Transplant Center - more and more people are turning to social media for organ donation.
"The list for organs just keeps getting longer and longer. The need far exceeds the supply of organs for healing purposes for transplantation," Professor Marilyn Coors, a medical ethicist at the Anschutz Medical Campus, said.
Coors say going through social media isn't always a safe method.
"It's understandable that you want to treat yourself or your loved ones, however the breach of privacy for a potential recipient, the potential for exploitation and coercion, is too high. I would never recommend that [method] to one of my relatives," Coors said.
Not many families can say they're thankful for Facebook, but this one truly is.
"It wasn't just Kourtney that saved Ryan's life. Without my Facebook friends, Kourtney wouldn't have known about Ryan. It connected us not only is my son's life being saved, but I have my sister back now. We are a family. We are complete now," Hernandez said.
"You never know how much your family means to you until you're about to lose them. I was very appreciate to have a second chance at life, a second chance to tell my family I loved them," Malloy said.
Malloy has made a full recovery.
For more information about being a donor do to www.Donatelifecolorado.org.
(KUSA-TV © 2012 Multimedia Holdings Corporation)