| LDO Home | General | Kidney | Liver | Marrow | Experiences | Buddies | Hall of Fame | Calendar | Contact Us |

Author Topic: Would You Sell Your Extra Kidney? (N.B.: A well written history and argument.)  (Read 1225 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Clark

  • Administrator
  • Top 10 Poster!
  • *****
  • Posts: 3,015
  • Please give the gift of life!
    • Living Donors Online!
https://www.wired.com/story/kidney-donor-compensation-market/

Would You Sell Your Extra Kidney?
Each year thousands die because there aren’t enough organs for transplants, and I may be one of them. It’s time to start compensating donors.
DYLAN WALSHBACKCHANNEL JAN 5, 2023

WHEN WE WERE teenagers, my brother and I received kidney transplants six days apart. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He, two years older, was scheduled to receive my dad’s kidney in April of 1998. Twenty-four hours before the surgery, the transplant team performed its final blood panel and discovered a tissue incompatibility that all the previous testing had somehow missed. My brother was pushed onto “the list,” where he’d wait, who knows how long, for the kidney of somebody who had died and possessed the generous foresight to be a donor after death. I was next in line for my dad’s kidney. We matched, and the date was set for August 28. Then my parents got a call early in the morning on August 22. There had been a car crash. A kidney was available. As with many things in life, my brother went first and I followed.



On a recent long weekend, while grandparents watched my brother’s two kids, he and his wife spent three days together in the wilderness, hiking and camping to celebrate the milestone of his 40th birthday and the return to a world uninflected by the weight of illness. They were back to normal—a euphemism for the completely unexpected. He is, in a way, still waiting on the generosity of friends and family and strangers, as am I. But his clock has been reset. It will keep its own time.
My bell will ring soon, I know, and I will join the crowd on the other side of the ledger, all of us applying friendly pressure to people we know and those we sort of know, pleading, waiting and jostling and clamoring together, assuming, each of us separately, because we must, that we won’t be one of the roughly 4,000 Americans who dies each year for lack of a kidney. It needn’t be such a big number.
Unrelated directed kidney donor in 2003, recipient and I both well.
620 time blood and platelet donor since 1976 and still giving!
Elected to the OPTN/UNOS Boards of Directors & Executive, Kidney Transplantation, and Ad Hoc Public Solicitation of Organ Donors Committees, 2005-2011
Proud grandpa!

 

 Subscribe in a reader



Copyright © International Association of Living Organ Donors, Inc. All Rights Reserved