Brenda,
I also asked the same question when being evaluated as a donor. Unlike you, I was very “not on board” with having an elective surgery. I worked in a hospital so I maybe I knew too much. I distinctly remember the doctors and nurses explaining how easy and minimally invasive the surgery was after I kept bringing up all the risks involved. I looked at them and said, “you all have two kidneys”. There wasn’t much to say after that. I believe the reason that more doctors, and in particular surgeons, do not donate is because they know what happens in hospitals. For a family member some of the health care providers might step up, but for a stranger, not so much. Everyone expects family and friends to do it not innocent bystanders. There is an underlying expectation that family will either want to do this or is expected to step up to the plate. Doctors know the complications of just being hospitalized, whether it is from medication errors, infection, blood clots, etc and know that surgery has real risks. It’s always easy to quote the 2 – 3 deaths in 10,000 (as Dr. Satel quotes in her article) but when it happens to you it’s 100%. Would be interested in knowing how many health providers have agreed to become organ donors upon death.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16kidney-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0Desperately Seeking a Kidney by Sally Satel 12/16/07
Dr. Satel, a psychiatrist writes about her ordeal in trying to find a donor. In her article she described an encounter with a potential donor, a colleague, also a doctor. See the excerpt below.
“…I told one of my best friends about my diagnosis. She and I first met more than 20 years before at the medical school at Yale, when I was finishing my residency in psychiatry and she was an instructor in the same department. Dr. Yale, as I’ll refer to her to protect her privacy, is a feisty blend of bubbly energy (last summer she made me ride the Cyclone with her at Coney Island) and intellectual seriousness (she is training to be a psychoanalyst). She immediately offered to check her blood type. I needed someone with type A or O, and in uncomplicated cases like mine, blood-type matching is usually one of the biggest hurdles to compatibility. Dr. Yale was type O. Presto!
She said she needed to talk it over with her husband but thought it would be fine. A week later, however, she said it wasn’t. “Giving you a kidney seemed a perfectly natural thing to do,” she told me. “I had the time, and I wanted to do what I could and in a clear way, far clearer than the vague helpfulness of say, psychiatry. But then I mentioned my plan to donate to a fellow alto at chorus rehearsal one evening.” As it turned out, the alto in question was no typical acquaintance: she was a transplant surgeon. My friend continued: “She was very surprised that I was planning to donate to a friend and then pulled an article out of her bag about hemorrhaging after donating.” The exchange set off a spiral ofanxiety in Dr. Yale’s mind — What if my brother or kids need my kidney? What if I had complications from surgery? I’m sorry, she said matter-of-factly, and that was that.
I understood that my friend wanted to spend her kidney wisely. What mystifies me still is how she got so spooked. After all, Dr. Yale was a physician herself, capable of weighing the risks. The operation is done by laparoscope, leaving only a modest three-inch scar; she would have been out of the hospital after two or three nights. Most important, the chance of death is tiny — 2 in every 10,000 transplants — and the long-term health risks are generally negligible.
More baffling to me, though, was the fact that she was talked out of donating by a person who removes and implants organs for a living. I was outraged. A transplant surgeon, of all people, knows how hard it is to find a donor, how grueling dialysis can be and how significant the health benefits of a “pre-emptive” transplant (that is, one received before the patient goes on dialysis) are. Not to mention the fact that hemorrhaging after donation is unusual. How dare she discourage someone who was ready to donate! Or had my friend been ready? It doesn’t matter now. But at the time, the surgeon was such a ready scapegoat that I could push the uneasy question about Dr. Yale aside.”