You need only one.
Ten years ago, my father donated a kidney to a former co-worker’s spouse. Ten weeks ago, my mother donated her kidney to her friend. In a way, they gave all of themselves. In reality, they gave an extra, four-by-two-by-one inch organ weighing about four ounces. In this, they gave life. Perhaps you can too.
As of Feb. 1, 2015, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) registers 2,718 people on the kidney transplant waiting list in Michigan alone. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has 123,251 patients on the national waiting list.
Johns Hopkins Medicine estimates the wait time for a kidney transplant to be between three and five years. During that time, these patients often go on dialysis — a treatment that regulates blood pressure and filters out waste, salt, and excess water. These treatments take about four hours, three times a week at a hospital or dialysis clinic. The National Kidney Foundation records the average life expectancy for people on dialysis as five to ten years.
Though life-saving, dialysis runs down the patient’s body, increasing the possibility of serious medical complications. According to Johns Hopkins, about two-thirds of patients eventually will receive a transplant. The rest will die, waiting for donors who never volunteer.
These deaths are unnecessary. Most adults have two kidneys, one more than is needed. As both my parents discovered, donating is easy and safe.
To donate a kidney — a standard procedure for the Mayo Clinic and John Hopkins Medicine, two of the leading transplant hospitals — a donor must be a healthy, willing adult with no evidence of kidney disease or medical conditions that could lead to kidney disease.
Potential donors also must pass rigorous medical, physical, and psychological test to ensure that the donor is fit and has sound motives for donating. These hospitals care just as much about the donor as they do the recipient.
If healthy, then the donor must match the recipient in blood and tissue type. This need not be a perfect match. Robert Montgomery, M.D., the director of the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Center, has said that “[w]e know now that the survival on dialysis is greatly decreased compared to transplantation, so it is really important to have a transplant as soon as possible and with any degree of matching it’s better to have a transplant than not.”
Sometimes the would-be donor does not even partially match the intended recipient. Organizations such as the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins work around this impediment with a paired donor option. This allows two or more donors to swap recipients for the best possible outcome.
The risks to the donor are minimal and recovery takes four to six weeks. Just as with any surgery, there are risks of bleeding and infection, but current research shows that donation does not affect life expectancy or risk of kidney disease.
The benefits for the recipient are immediate and obvious. The morning after the transplant, my mother’s recipient walked into my mom’s hospital room to share the joyful news that the kidney was working. Post-transplant, she works a full day, eats and drinks normally, and is training for her first marathon. She no longer survives; she lives.
My 54-year-old mother was walking a couple miles a day just over a week after her surgery. She returned to work less than a month after her surgery and was back at the gym two weeks later. When the opportunity arises, I hope to follow her example. I can’t die with two kidneys.
