By last Monday, Pam Duefrene had some mild soreness around her abdomen - like she'd done too many sit-ups - and tired easily.

Otherwise, though, the Niantic resident felt "pretty amazing."

"The only things I can't do are drive and lift things," the 46-year-old table games manager at Mohegan Sun said while recuperating at home.

For someone who had just had three hours of major surgery four days earlier, Duefrene was sounding positively chipper. If there's a perfect way to lose one of the body's major organs, Duefrene may have found it.

She spent Aug. 19 sharing an operating room at New York Presbyterian Hospital with two teams of doctors and nurses and Renee Tricarico, a 51-year-old New York City jewelry designer with advanced polycystic kidney disease. PKD is a genetic condition that causes the kidneys to fail.

Strangers just a few months earlier, Duefrene and Tricarico met through an online organ donor network, www.MatchingDonors.com, and by the time the day of surgery came, the two were making each other laugh in the post-op area.

One of Duefrene's kidneys is now at work in Tricarico, helping cleanse her body of wastes, regulate her blood pressure, ensure she has enough red blood cells and perform other vital functions.

"The surgery went so well, it was astonishing," Tricarico said Monday in a phone interview from the hospital while preparing to go home that afternoon. "I'm a very lucky recipient of her altruism. I'm left with a feeling of embarrassment for how to repay this debt. Now she's like family.

"Our meeting and being matched, it's like a divine plan."

Tricarico's family has been besieged by the illness, with her father, her two brothers and herself all inheriting the gene that eventually causes kidney failure, sometimes as early in life as the 30s. There is no cure for PKD, but Tricarico said she worked to stay healthy for as long as possible.

Her red blood cell production had diminished severely, her blood pressure was high and her blood chemistry was off. The only solution was dialysis, which is itself debilitating over time, or a transplant. She signed on to the donor website, hoping for a match with someone with Type O blood. She expected the wait would be several years, but in less than a year she and Duefrene were matched.

"I put my bio up, and then I saw Pam's bio, and I wrote her and she wrote back," Tricarico recalled. "She seemed compelled to help me. For some reason we just had this bond. I feel very blessed."

Duefrene said she had put her name on the donor list several years earlier, deciding to become an organ donor as a way of repaying the kindness of someone who donated bone marrow to a niece with leukemia when no family-member matches were found. Because of the donor's kindness, her niece lived a few more years.

"I will always be a huge advocate for organ donation because of the years we had with Ann Marie because of a perfect stranger," she said. "To be able to have more time with a sick family member ... "

When Duefrene saw Tricarico's husband, Ernesto, after the surgery, she said, she felt doubly rewarded for how she'd been able to affect both lives so profoundly.

"He was so grateful and so happy to see her," she recalled.