Becoming the Person She Once Needed: Dr. Rachel Cavallaro’s Journey to Transplant Psychology

Barbara Doyle
2 days ago
8 min read

Female transplant psychologist in white coat smiling

When Dr. Rachel Cavallaro first saw the job posting for a transplant psychologist at Hartford Hospital, she had an unusual reaction.

“I’m not the psychologist you’re looking for,” she remembers thinking. “But I’m the psychologist you need.”

Nearly four years later, those words feel remarkably prescient.

As a clinical psychologist embedded within Hartford Hospital’s transplant program, Cavallaro works with heart, liver and kidney transplant patients, as well as living donors, before and after transplantation. She provides psychological assessments, individual therapy, cognitive testing and group therapy. She helps patients and families navigate fear, grief, identity, relationships, addiction, trauma and the enormous emotional adjustments that can accompany transplantation.

But the path that brought her to transplant psychology was anything but straightforward. It began long before she ever imagined becoming a psychologist.

Finding Strength in Difficult Places

Young female in a martial arts uniform wearing a black belt and holding a black belt trophy

Cavallaro grew up in what she describes as a broken home affected by addiction. As a child, she carried anger and pain that she did not always know how to express. She found an unexpected outlet in martial arts.

Cavallaro earned her first black belt at age 12 and her second-degree black belt at 16. At 21, she changed disciplines and earned another black belt. She later spent several years competing in full-contact Muay Thai before eventually turning to natural bodybuilding. Looking back, she sees those years as formative.

Martial arts taught her that strength could be developed, discomfort could be endured, and, perhaps most importantly, she could have agency over the direction of her own life. Those lessons would continue to surface throughout her career.

“I know what it feels like to want someone to listen,” Cavallaro says. “I know what it feels like to search for strength and identity. And I know the transformative power of finding something, or someone, that helps you recognize your own capacity to change.”

A Different Kind of Service

Dr. Rachel Cavallaro as a staff sergeant in the US Army.

At 17, Cavallaro joined the Army National Guard as a way to put herself through college. She eventually became a military police officer and staff sergeant, served in Germany and later extended her military contract so she could deploy to Afghanistan with the soldiers she had spent years training alongside. Her military service, including experiences with leadership, conflict and moral injury, initially pointed her toward a career working with veterans.

She believed her combination of combat experience and psychology training might allow her to connect with veterans in a way relatively few psychologists could. But, as would happen several times in her life, the path changed. After experiencing the VA system both as a veteran and later as a clinical trainee, she realized it was not where she believed she could do her best work. She pivoted.

Understanding Addiction From Both Sides

While earning her doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Hartford, Cavallaro needed to work. She took a job in substance-use treatment, partly because she knew experience in addiction would be valuable if she eventually worked with veterans.

Then something unexpected happened. She discovered she was very good at it. She also began to understand her own childhood differently.

“Once I got into treatment and started working with people, it felt natural to me,” she recalls. “I just showed up as an authentic person.”

Working with people experiencing addiction gave her a new understanding of the people she had grown up around and the struggles they had faced.

“It helped me understand that this wasn’t simply a choice,” she says.

Years later, reflecting on why she has consistently been drawn to populations who may feel abandoned, misunderstood, or failed by the systems around them, Cavallaro arrived at an answer she had not fully articulated during the interview.

“Perhaps, in some ways, I was helping others while also healing a part of myself. I think there is something deeply meaningful about being the person for someone else that you once needed yourself.”

Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

There is another image Cavallaro often returns to when thinking about identity, suffering and recovery: Alice in Wonderland. Even as a child, she says, she was never particularly interested in stories about princesses waiting to be rescued. Alice fascinated her instead. As Cavallaro later specialized in addiction, she began interpreting Alice’s journey differently.

Alice repeatedly encounters things that promise to transform her. She becomes larger. She becomes smaller. She tries to adjust herself to fit the strange world around her, only to discover that each solution creates another problem. For Cavallaro, the story became a metaphor for something she saw repeatedly in her clinical work.

Many people spend years attempting to change themselves to fit into environments that were never designed to understand them. Addiction, trauma and other forms of suffering may become ways of coping with pain, searching for identity or attempting to regain control. Recovery, she believes, cannot simply be about taking a behavior or substance away. It must also help people understand that they are worthy of being heard, understood, and supported.

One line from Alice in Wonderland has become particularly meaningful in her work:

“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”

For Cavallaro, that idea captures an essential truth about recovery.

“We cannot change what happened to us, but we can change what we do with it,” she says. “Growth does not require us to erase the person we once were.”

An Unexpected Road to Transplant Psychology

Cavallaro eventually completed an internship at an addiction treatment facility in Colorado, where she worked with patients including physicians, nurses, pilots and other professionals whose addictions had affected their careers. She later built an outpatient psychology service and began encountering transplant patients receiving addiction treatment. That was her first introduction to transplant psychology.

“I didn’t even know this was a thing,” she remembers thinking.

Then life redirected her again. In 2021, Cavallaro learned that her father had pancreatic cancer. His illness progressed rapidly. She immediately returned to Connecticut to be with her family.

After taking a remote therapy position that provided flexibility during that period, she eventually saw a posting for the transplant psychology position at Hartford Hospital. A chance conversation with a physician assistant connected to the transplant recovery unit encouraged her to apply. She did. And suddenly, many of the seemingly unrelated experiences in her life began to fit together.

· Addiction treatment

· Trauma

· Military service

· Psychological assessment

· Group therapy

· Work with underserved populations

· Cognitive testing

Each became part of Cavallaro's approach to transplant psychology.

The Emotional Side of Transplantation

Transplantation is often discussed in medical terms: organs, medications, surgical procedures, waitlists and laboratory values. Cavallaro sees another dimension every day. For patients waiting for transplant, serious illness can gradually dismantle the life they thought they would have.

“You’re grieving the life that you thought you were going to have and are actively losing,” she says.

Work may become impossible. Relationships can change. Independence can disappear. People who once provided support may withdraw. Identity itself can begin to shift.

Then there is the uncertainty. Will an organ become available? Will the patient remain healthy enough for transplant? What happens if it does not come in time?

Cavallaro practices cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, and emphasizes what she calls accurate thinking rather than simply positive thinking. Positive thinking can be comforting, she explains, but when taken too far it can become a form of denial.

Telling someone waiting for a transplant, “Don’t worry, you’ll get an organ,” may sound encouraging, but it promises something no one can guarantee. Her role is different. It is to help patients understand the reality of their circumstances and develop the psychological tools to live within that uncertainty.

The Work Does Not End After Transplant

Female doctor wearing full scrubs, smiling in an operating room

One of the most surprising things Cavallaro tells patients is that transplantation is not the end of the psychological journey.

“In the same breath that I’m telling people everything they are going through before transplant is extremely difficult, I’m telling them the real work starts on the post side,” she says.

A successful transplant can restore health and possibility, but patients are also adjusting to an entirely new reality. They may experience fear of rejection, survivor’s guilt, changing relationships, new expectations and questions about who they are now that the illness that dominated their lives has changed.

“Once you’re a transplant patient, you’re a transplant patient forever,” Cavallaro says.

That is one reason she believes ongoing mental health support can be so valuable.

Creating a Community

White-haired gentleman posing for a photo with transplant psychologist

Among Cavallaro’s proudest accomplishments is a transplant therapy group that has now been meeting for approximately three years. It is not simply a support group. Cavallaro draws an important distinction.

Support groups often focus on connection and shared experience. Therapy groups intentionally challenge participants to reflect, become vulnerable, and continue growing. Many post-transplant patients initially join to help people who are still waiting. They arrive ready to say, essentially, “Look at me. I made it. You can too.”

Cavallaro helps them recognize that their own psychological journey is still unfolding. Over time, the group became such a strong community that when Cavallaro went on maternity leave, the members continued meeting without her. For her, that was a defining moment.

“I thought, ‘I did it,’” she recalls. “I created a community. I created a sense of connection to such a degree that they can now support themselves even when I’m not there.”

The Complicated Gift of Living Donation

Cavallaro also works with potential living donors, where the psychological questions can be especially complex. A person may want to donate an organ to a spouse, sibling, parent, child, friend or even someone they have never met. And motivations matter.

A donor may genuinely want to help while also feeling pressure, obligation, or fear of what might happen if they say no. “If I don’t do this and this person dies, is it my fault?” Those are not simple questions. Cavallaro works alongside transplant social workers to explore the deeper psychological dynamics behind donation.

Mental health history itself does not automatically prevent someone from becoming a living donor. Instead, the team wants to understand whether a person is emotionally prepared, whether expectations are realistic, and whether there are underlying needs or pressures that could affect the donor after surgery. Living donation is elective surgery performed on a healthy person. Protecting the donor means caring for psychological health as carefully as physical health.

High Risk, High Reward

Three hospital employees standing in front of a helicopter on a hospital helipad.

The work can be emotionally intense. Cavallaro walks alongside people during frightening illnesses, uncertain waits, and sometimes devastating outcomes. So, what keeps her doing it?

“High risk, high reward,” she says.

She sees people whose lives have been stripped away by illness receive transplants and begin rebuilding. She watches people move from surviving to thriving. She sees former patients return to thank the nurses who cared for them, the staff member who helped them feel human during a long hospitalization, or the person who made them laugh during one of the hardest periods of their lives.

“Being able to bear witness to that truly is a gift in and of itself,” she says.

From Fear to Understanding

promotional image encouraging viewer to register to be an organ donor

Cavallaro’s experience in transplantation has also changed her personally. Before entering the field, she admits she had absorbed one of the common myths surrounding organ donation: the fear that being a registered donor might somehow affect the medical care she received in an emergency. After seeing how transplantation actually works, her perspective changed completely.

“If you knew the miracle that it takes to actually get from a deceased donor to a recipient, there’s no way that is even possible,” she says.

The medical professionals treating an injured or critically ill patient are focused on saving that patient’s life. The process that eventually makes deceased organ donation possible involves a complex series of medical, ethical, and logistical steps.

Cavallaro now proudly identifies herself as a registered organ donor. She also believes misinformation can be particularly powerful because most people understandably do not know the intricacies of transplantation. That makes education essential. For Cavallaro, education is not simply about correcting misconceptions. It can be the beginning of healing.

“Education is the first intervention,” she says.

Becoming the Person She Needed

When Cavallaro looks back across the seemingly disconnected pieces of her life, the path to transplant psychology now feels more coherent.

The child searching for a way to channel anger.
The martial artist learning discipline and resilience.
The young soldier leading others.
The veteran who understood what it meant to feel unheard by a system.
The clinician learning to see addiction through a new lens.
The psychologist drawn to people experiencing trauma, uncertainty, and profound change.

And now, the transplant psychologist sitting beside patients during some of the most difficult and transformative moments of their lives.

“I became a clinician because I wanted to help people find that strength within themselves,” Cavallaro says. “In many ways, I became the person I once needed.”

Learn More About Organ and Tissue Donation

Every donor registration represents the possibility of hope, healing and more time for someone waiting for a lifesaving transplant. Learn the facts, talk with your loved ones and register your decision to be an organ and tissue donor. Visit donatelifect.org.

Comments

Twice Saved:

Melissa Reynolds’ Extraordinary Journey Through Two Organ Transplants

Every organ donor makes a choice that echoes long after they’re gone. For Melissa Reynolds, two such choices — made by two strangers — kept her here to do the work she was born to do.

On the evening of October 9, 2024, Melissa Reynolds walked into Hartford Hospital not knowing she would not walk out again for four months.

She hadn’t planned to be admitted. She had gone from her endocrinologist’s office directly to the emergency department at her doctor’s insistence, bags unpacked, husband by her side, her mother meeting them there. Melissa, a recreational therapist at the Institute of Living since 2007 — one of Connecticut’s premier psychiatric care facilities — had spent years caring for some of the state’s most vulnerable people. She knew how hospitals worked. She didn’t think she was that sick.

She was wrong.

What followed was one of the most remarkable — and harrowing — journeys of survival that Donate Life Connecticut has ever had the privilege of hearing. It is a story about the fragility of life and the stunning resilience of the human spirit. It is a story about the extraordinary generosity of organ donors and the ripple effect of their gift. And it is a story about a woman who, even at her sickest, was already thinking about how she would give back.

A Health History She Couldn’t Outrun

Melissa had always known her immune system was compromised. She had fatty liver disease and a cluster of autoimmune conditions that made her body work harder than most just to get through the day. Working in a residential psychiatric program since the height of the pandemic in 2020, she had been exposed to illness repeatedly — and had come through it each time.

In June of 2024, she caught COVID again. It wasn’t the first time, and initially, it didn’t seem like the last. But this time, she didn’t fully bounce back. She pushed through — traveling internationally, working, living — even as her body was quietly losing a battle she didn’t know she was fighting.

“I was tired. I knew I was sick, but since COVID in 2020, I was always kind of sick. It was hard to know when things had really changed.”

By the time her endocrinologist examined her in early October, he couldn’t send her home. He triaged her directly to Hartford Hospital.

Into the ICU

The emergency department at Hartford Hospital was crowded the night Melissa arrived. She waited hours. When she was finally admitted, she had no idea how long she would be there. Her MELD score — a measurement of liver disease severity used to prioritize transplant candidates — was critically high.

Over the weeks that followed, Melissa was transferred between floors multiple times. Codes were called. She was moved to a cardiac unit. She experienced what clinicians call ICU delirium — a state of profound disorientation brought on by critical illness, sedation, and the relentless sensory disruption of intensive care. For Melissa, it was severe. The boundary between what was real and what wasn’t collapsed entirely.

“I thought I was dead. I saw a lot of themes around death. And there was always some truth to what I was seeing — I was dying. I just didn’t know it at the time.”

She would look over from her bed, confused, not knowing where she was or what day it was, and find a nurse standing there, smiling. “I got you. I got you.” It was a face she came to anchor herself to — a steady, human presence in the chaos. When the delirium finally lifted, she looked at that same nurse and thought: “Oh my God. You’re real.”

“I think what they say is true,” she reflects. “You don’t always remember what people did, but you always remember how they made you feel.”

Melissa spent at least six weeks — by some accounts, eight — in the ICU. Her coworkers at the Institute of Living didn’t know if she was coming back. Her family gathered. They had the kinds of conversations families have when hope is uncertain, and decisions are urgent. The news was that heavy.

The Call That Changed Everything

Two days after Thanksgiving 2024, a doctor came to Melissa’s bedside and told her they had found a liver.

She doesn’t remember every word of that conversation. She was still fragile, still in and out of clarity. But she remembers the essential facts: the donor was a woman in her late 30s who had died, the doctor believed, in a car accident. Young. Someone with a whole life ahead of her.

“I wish I could have remembered more from when he told me. But I was just so focused on what was happening next.”

What happened next was a full liver transplant performed overnight by Dr. Serrano and Dr. Emanuel. Because it was a holiday weekend, both surgeons worked through the night together. By Sunday morning, Melissa’s husband received a call. The surgery had gone well.

She came off the ventilator on Tuesday. Physical therapy began on Friday.

November 30, 2024. That date is now etched into Melissa Reynolds’ life the way birthdays are — because in every meaningful sense, it was one.

A Long Way Home

Recovery in the ICU and rehabilitation unit was not linear. Melissa went back and forth between care floors, navigated setback after setback, and slowly, painstakingly, began to rebuild what her body had lost. She relearned how to stand. She worked with physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech therapists. She continued dialysis three times a week, because the liver transplant had left her kidneys under severe strain.

She remembers a moment with her physical therapy team that she still talks about. She was frustrated. Her body wasn’t doing what she told it to. She couldn’t understand why something so simple felt impossible.

“They got down to my level and said, ‘You just had a liver transplant. You are so strong.’ And that was almost what I needed to keep going.”

A doctor on the rehabilitation unit told her she was one of the most motivated patients they had ever had. Melissa’s response has stayed with everyone who heard it:

“I have to be — and I have to stay positive — because I can’t even figure out how to get up or stand up. I have to get out of this hospital. I have a life left to live. I have to get back to work someday.”

That drive — paired with the daily encouragement of the nurses, therapists, dietary aides, and every staff member who walked through her door — is what she credits with pulling her through. “I am so thankful for the staff who kept me going every day and helped me to stay positive and focused,” she says. “Without them, I don’t think I could have done it.”

There were hard moments, too. One of them came when a doctor quietly told her that she would not be going home for Christmas. Melissa processed that one alone. She didn’t tell her family right away. She sat with it.

“I thought, you know what — get through it. This sucks. But get through it.”

She did. She was discharged on February 12, 2025, after 126 days in the hospital. When the elevator doors opened in the lobby, she was sitting in a wheelchair. Waiting for her — having stood in that lobby for nearly an hour — were her supervisor, a coworker, and four of her psychiatric clients, holding welcome home signs they had made themselves.

“I just started crying. The nurse was telling me I had to get in the car because it was freezing. But I couldn’t move. These are people I care for. And they came to wait for me.”

Finding a New Normal

Melissa started outpatient dialysis the very next day. Her schedule was three sessions a week. Doctors’ appointments filled the gaps. Home therapy continued. She leaned into music — always a coping skill, now a daily anchor — and into reading, which she had always loved but never made enough time for. She allowed herself, for the first time, the gift of stillness.

She also set a goal: she was going back to work.

On August 27, 2025, Melissa returned to the Institute of Living — 20 hours a week, working her schedule around dialysis days. The staff and clients who had once quietly prepared themselves for her absence watched her come through the door.

“People didn’t think I was going to make it. A lot of people had come to say goodbye. My coworkers had to grieve me at one point. And then I just walked back in.”

That same fall, in September 2025, Melissa attended the Donate Life Connecticut Gala — a celebration of the lives that organ donation touches. What most people in that room didn’t know was that she was desperately ill that night. She had been on dialysis earlier that day. She was nauseated throughout the event. She had been sick in the parking lot on the way in.

She stayed until the end.

That night, a woman named Danielle quietly followed her out and asked if she was okay. Danielle had walked her own transplant journey and recognized the signs. In that moment, a friendship was born — the kind that only forms between people who understand each other without explanation.

The Second Gift

By the fall of 2025, Melissa was on the kidney transplant list. After a liver transplant, recipients are given priority consideration for a kidney if one is needed within a certain timeframe — an acknowledgment of the physical toll the first surgery takes on the body’s other organs. Melissa was eager. She pushed her care team. “Can we do April? Let’s go. Let’s get this done.”

It doesn’t work like that. She knew that, too.

The night before Thanksgiving, she was at home with her family, laughing about food. She had missed every holiday the year before and was talking about how much she couldn’t wait to eat. She had all but given up on the kidney coming before the new year.

At 6:30 the next morning, her phone rang. She had one hour.

“I went around like a little kid on Christmas. I woke up my parents. I woke up my husband. I said, I’m getting a kidney!”

The surgery was on November 17, 2025. Her second deceased donor — this time, a man. She went in on a Monday. She was discharged on Friday.

Four days, compared to four months.

“The first time around was my whole journey. The kidney was a much different experience.”

Why She Tells Her Story

When Donate Life Connecticut asked Melissa what she hoped people would take from hearing her story, she didn’t hesitate.

“I want to bring awareness to organ donation. But I also want to acknowledge the care that hospital staff gives every single day — because without the people inside those walls, I don’t think I would be here. I had incredible support on the outside. But the people who were with me 24 hours a day, who showed up every shift, who encouraged me and made me laugh and pushed me — they saved my life, too.”

Melissa had registered as an organ donor at sixteen years old. She didn’t know anyone who had received a transplant. She had never thought deeply about what it meant. When she was asked at the DMV, her instinct was simply: if something happened to me, why wouldn’t I?

“To me, it was just being a human.”

Now she is on the other side of that question — twice over. Two people she will never meet made decisions that kept her alive. She plans to write to both of their families when she’s ready. She has been gathering the courage for it, the way you gather yourself before something that matters deeply.

In the meantime, she is giving back in every way she can. She is volunteering with Donate Life Connecticut events. She has signed up for the walk. She is working toward the Dragon Boat race. And she is returning to the Institute of Living — full time now — to the clients and colleagues who once said goodbye and then watched, astonished, as she walked back through the door.

The Full Circle

Donate Life Connecticut’s Marketing Director, Barb Doyle, spent the first chapter of her career as an occupational therapist working in psychiatric rehabilitation. She knows the Institute of Living. She knows the particular kind of person it takes to do that work — the patience, the empathy, the humanistic commitment to showing up for people whose struggles are invisible to the outside world.

When she heard Melissa’s story, she said what everyone in the room was feeling:

“Through the gift of these two people who gave their organs when they could no longer take them with them, they have kept you serving the people who so desperately need you. That is a full-circle moment.”

Melissa Reynolds is a recreational therapist, a transplant recipient, a survivor, and now a voice for organ donation in Connecticut. She is proof that one decision, made by a stranger at a DMV counter, made by a family in the worst moment of their lives, can preserve something irreplaceable in this world.

You Can Make the Same Choice

Melissa’s donors registered their decision before they ever needed to. That’s how it works. You don’t know when the moment will come — for you, or for someone waiting for the call that changes everything.

If you haven’t registered as an organ, eye, and tissue donor, you can do so today at registerme.org. It takes less than two minutes.

And if Melissa’s story moved you, stay with us. This blog is just beginning. We’ll be sharing the stories of organ recipients, living donors, and donor families across Connecticut. Because every one of these stories is proof of what is possible when we choose to give.

Donate Life Connecticut is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of organ, eye, and tissue donation throughout Connecticut.

Do you have a story to share? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us here.