Salem ― Rob Ruttkamp wants to live.

He says so on his Facebook page, on billboards and in a television commercial that has aired in the New York City area and in Fairfield County. Basically, he wants the world to know.

He’s looking for a living liver donor.

Ruttkamp, 59, has nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, a condition that develops when the body stores excess fat in the liver cells, making it difficult for the liver to function. A form of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD, it can seriously damage the liver, the football-sized organ essential for digesting food and ridding the body of toxins.

During an interview last week in their West Road home, Ruttkamp and his wife, Debbie Ruttkamp, 61, discussed the journey they’re on, one they hope will culminate in a transplantation procedure in which a portion of a living donor’s liver replaces Rob’s badly scarred liver.

Following such a surgery, both the donor’s remaining half-liver and the transplanted portion Ruttkamp receives will grow to full size. The only organ capable of regenerating itself, the liver is the second-most-transplanted organ, behind the kidney, and followed by the heart and the lungs.

“I have good days and bad days,” said Ruttkamp, who puts in as many hours as possible at Ring’s End in Niantic, the home improvement retailer where he’s worked for the past 18 years. Bouts of nausea and dry heaves can send him home early.

“I have to stay active,” he said. “I can’t just sit around.”

Ruttkamp’s boss, Eddie Abbiati, the general manager at Ring’s End, joked that Ruttkamp ought to get on a plane and “get out of here, take a vacation.”

“He’s been a great employee,” Abbiati said. “We know he’s going through some things. I think it’s a relief for him to be able to come to work, whether it’s two hours, six hours or eight hours, whatever it is. We’re all supportive of him.”

It was late last year that Ruttkamp learned his liver’s condition had deteriorated. A biopsy ordered by Dr. Michael Einstein, a gastroenterologist at Hartford Hospital, showed it was “cirrhotic,” or severely scarred. The blood-work based MELD (Model for End-Stage Liver Disease) scoring system, which is used to prioritize the allocation of liver transplants, would suggest how urgently Ruttkamp needed a transplant.

“He said it wasn’t a death sentence,” Ruttkamp said, referring to Einstein.

In a matter of months, Ruttkamp’s name would be added to a list of candidates for a liver transplant at Hartford Hospital, which only performs transplants from deceased donors. Einstein said the hospital lacks the volume of patients and the infrastructure necessary to perform live transplants, which represent 5% of all liver transplants.

Einstein said Hartford Hospital has 60 liver patients awaiting a transplant, their donors likely to be victims of such events as traffic fatalities and drug overdoses. Tragically, he said, the opioid epidemic has provided many donors in recent years.

Ruttkamp was not inclined to wait for a deceased donor.

“I’m too young, too strong,” he said. “I’ll do whatever I can to do the living program.”

Einstein referred Ruttkamp to Dr. Samuel Sigal at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y., where Montefiore has collaborated with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to create the Montefiore Einstein living donor transplantation program, a designated center of excellence.

The Ruttkamps met Sigal in February. After reviewing Ruttkamp’s history, which includes a series of hernia operations in recent years, the doctor provided a stunning prognosis: Ruttkamp might live only three months without a transplant ― a forecast more dire than any Dr. Einstein had delivered.

“Your heart stops,” Ruttkamp said, recalling what it felt like to hear Sigal’s prognosis. “You start thinking about running out of time and what that really means.”

“I’ve sat in my room and cried many times,” he said. “But crying and not doing anything are not going to help you out. So, I try to spread the word that I need a donor. Lee Elci (a local radio host) has mentioned it on his show, and I’ve done Facebook, the commercial. … People have this misconception that a guy needing a liver transplant is a drunk. But liver damage doesn’t have to be from drinking.”

Ruttkamp’s liver disease likely has a genetic component. Two of his four siblings ― a 47-year-old brother and a 62-year-old sister ― have died of the disease.

As part of Montefiore’s program, Ruttkamp created a video that has been posted on the hospital’s transplantation website, liveandletlive.com, and aired as a television commercial. When the Ruttkamps, originally from Stamford, attended a family wedding in Vermont this month, relatives from Fairfield County told them they had seen the commercial.

At one point, it seemed the get-the-word-out blitz had succeeded.

A southeastern Connecticut man, an acquaintance of Ruttkamp’s son Kyle, had seen Ruttkamp’s plea on Facebook and had offered to donate part of his liver.

“I heard about it while I was driving home and I thought, ‘This is a miracle,’” Ruttkamp said.

The prospective donor cleared a screening process, meaning he was in good health, had the right blood type ― either “B” or “O” in Ruttkamp’s case ― and was the right stature.

But he ultimately backed out.

“You can’t be mad, this is a stranger,” Ruttkamp said philosophically. “They tell you not to rely on one person. Right up until the time of the surgery, until they’re on the table, they have the right to change their mind.”

Einstein, the Hartford Hospital doctor, said Ruttkamp is not in imminent danger of dying. His MELD score has fallen from where it was when Einstein referred him to Sigal at Montefiore.

“For the time being, he’s in a better position than he had been in,” Einstein said. “But he’s still a candidate for a transplant because he feels poorly and because his overall quality of life will improve with a transplant. … Today, I’m treating patients who had transplants in 2010 and 2013 … some are even 20 and 30 years out.”

Ruttkamp wants to live, he said, “for my wife, for my son and for my grandson Wyatt,” who, at 14 months old, has undergone multiple surgeries after being born with complications.

“He’s our little good luck charm,” Ruttkamp said. “When I have a down day, if I go see him, I feel so much better. … I have too much to do still.”

b.hallenbeck@theday.com