When Damian Rzeznikiewiz walked through the apartment door, bouquet in hand, Jamie Kaplan’s chin quivered with emotion.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hey,” she replied in a tremulous tone, and then opened her arms wide.

Within seconds the two strangers fell into each other’s embrace. He told her how good she looked, how happy he was to meet her. Weeping, she barely managed, “I can’t talk now.”

Kaplan, 50, had wanted to meet Rzeznikiewiz since that day in August 2010 when she had the bone marrow transplant that saved her life. Of course, at that time she knew little about her donor except that he was a 23-year-old male who lived out of the country.

“I wanted to thank him, a total stranger, for doing something like that,” Kaplan said. “Everyone in my family wanted to meet this angel, this absolute angel.”

Monday afternoon, in her mother’s Aventura apartment, Kaplan got her wish. Rzeznikiewiz, her angel, flew in from Toronto to join his family vacationing in Aventura. Kaplan of Macon, Ga., was in town visiting her mother, Letty Kaplan, and sister, Barbara Kaplan Gertner.

Also witnessing the joyous reunion were her two brothers, her rabbi and Rzeznikiewiz’s parents, Bruno and Claudia.

Rzeznikiewiz was a bit overwhelmed. Now 25 and a medical student, he insisted he is neither hero nor angel.

“It’s my duty as a human being,” he said of his life-saving donation. “That’s why we’re here for — to help each other out. It’s really a no-brainer.”

The events that brought Kaplan and Rzeznikiewiz together began in November 2009, when Kaplan, the head tennis coach at Stratford Academy in Macon, began suffering from pangs she mistook for sciatic pain.

As a former professional tennis player who had made it to each of the four Grand Slam events, she was used to physical suffering after undergoing numerous surgeries.

She figured her most recent experience was the result of playing in a tournament five days in a row.

But after six weeks, the pain was so excruciating that she contacted her orthopedic surgeon. X-rays, an MRI and a CT scan followed and in April 2010 doctors delivered the diagnosis: extra medullary acute myeloid leukemia — AML for short. Her form of AML was actually quite rare and presented itself as tumors. One of her three tumors was wrapped around a nerve. Hence, the pain.

She started chemotherapy in May 2010, followed by radiation, but she knew from the beginning that her rare form of AML would require a bone marrow transplant.

About a year earlier and several hundred miles away, Rzeznikiewiz was an undergraduate studying at York University in Toronto. A friend who belonged to a fraternity had told him about a donor drive sponsored by the Gift of Life National Bone Marrow Foundation, based in Boca Raton. “It was a cheek swab, no big thing. I didn’t think much about it,” he recalled.

Over the next few months Rzeznikiewiz would get three calls from the registry identifying him as a possible match, but initial blood tests would eventually rule him out as a perfect match. Not in Kaplan’s case, however.

He and his father were eventually flown to Boston where the bone marrow was harvested, a procedure he said was quite simple. “I’d do it over and over again, however many times they need me,” he said. “The few hours I took off were well worth it.”