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Soon to be a non-directed donor

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Skittles-:
Hiya everyone,

I’m 33, female and live in Australia. I started the work up process a year ago, and it’s all systems go. I’m currently waiting for the Australian kidney exchange to do one of their matching runs to hopefully come up with a chain. I didn’t match any of the hard to match waiting list patients within my state, so now we do the country wide testing.

I found this forum via reddit, I don’t use Facebook so I’m not gonna go there. I’ve read a lot of stories and it’s been really helpful. So far I think Australia stands out as having a great health system, and I trust that everyone will take good care of me. It helps that I work in a hospital (admin, I’m not medical staff), so I have known most of the doctors and nurses for years.

It’s been a pretty uneventful work up, the only thing is I found out at the start that I had low iron. I started taking iron tablets, then recently got retested and my iron is actually lower. So now I have to double my iron tablets, and probably have an iron infusion. I’ve been vegan for 11 years and my iron has never been low before. But I have been very tired for months, just chalked it up to other life things, so I hope that after the infusion I’ll feel better. Once over recovered from surgery I’ll be able to lower my iron tablet dosage and try to keep my iron up with diet.

Oh and my Dad is making a short documentary, with permission from the hospital, about organ donation. It will be for the hospital to use for patient education or websites or promotion type things. My dad is a big science nerd so it’s his latest project :) I’ll be sure to share a link once it’s all done! We’ve both become quite passionate about organ donation now.

Hope to post more soon! Thanks for creating this site!

Janey

Fr Pat:
Best wishes and prayers. I donated non-directed in the U.S. 16 years ago and all went well. If you wish you can click "experiences" at the top of this website and read a number of donation narrations. There is also a very interesting book called "Flesh of her Flesh" by Slavenka Drakulic. Has been printed in several European languages but is available in English only as an e-book at Amazon and other sellers. She received a kidney from a stranger, and then set out to interview as many non-directed donors  as she could find, to try to see whay ordinary people would do such a nice thing. Interesting reading.
     Fr. Pat

Michael:
Janey,

Thanks for sharing your experiences so far. I hope all goes well. Please keep us posted on your progress!

KidneyDonor2014:
Congratulations, Janey!  And THANK YOU for even looking into being a donor.  I too donated to a stranger in 2004.  (Hi Father Pat!  We connected through Slavenka shortly after I donated.  Hello, Father Pat!  We connected through Slavenka years ago.  I'm in Vermont.)  And my donor and I were interviewed by Slavenka and have a chapter written about us.  I hope they get the iron thing figured out for you.  You're almost there!  One of the very best experiences in my entire life . . .

Fr Pat:
Hi "...2014"! Nice to be remembered. I've been out here in Japan (Okinawa) for 13 years now, but keep plugging away regarding organ donation, and I make it back to the U.S. for the "Transplant Games" every 2 years. Best wishes!
   Fr. Pat

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