After I got over being so distressed about finding myself secretly dropped from the donor list of eligible blood marrow transplantees, I decided to pursue donating a kidney. What???? Why? Are you Crazie? Well, yes, probably. But that's nothing new to anyone who knows me fairly well.
I have been patiently waiting for many years to get the call that they had found a use for my marrow, even though I understand the harvesting part is excruciating, and I am a class A wimp. But when I discovered late last year that I am past the age of being considered for transplanting my marrow into someone who could use it - it made me sad. I've been enjoying it all this time, and it still seems to be perfectly good to me. Maybe not the freshest ever after all this time - but remember: I am the one who can eat things out of the 'fridge that would make anyone else here deathly ill, without any apparent ill effects to my digestive tract. So I assumed I was taking good care of my marrow too.
I read an article several weeks back about a combination of people who had donated or received kidneys in a kind of round-robin situation, and thought: well, maybe.... so I checked to see where the nearest hospital that does transplants is: Emory in Atlanta. I made the call a couple of weeks ago, and talked to someone who set me up with a telephone appointment. Which we did last week while I was in Valdosta. And I got a stack of paperwork the first of this week, which I mostly completed today. And will finish up to get in the mail and send back to the transplant program on Monday.
It is understandably complicated. You'd want to be sure you were going to have success if you went to all the trouble to have someone else's body part inserted into your personal space. If the paperwork appears satisfactory, I would have to go at some point to spend a couple of days having a lot of outpatient testing done to be sure everything is in good working order. And then they would have to find the recipient.
When I was doing the phone interview last week, the nurse asked who that person was, and I said I did not know. She said: 'Oh, you are an altruistic donor?' I said 'No, not really...I don't think so - I just have something someone needs and don't mind sharing'. In the same way I donate a pint of blood four or five times a year (even though I know this is much more involved and risky). It's just something I have - spare parts, and I know it can make a big difference in someone's life.
So... we will see how things go. She told me they take the 'spare' out laproscopically, and only make about a three inch incision - which shortens recovery time considerably. But I am pretty sure the person who gets the upgrade has a much larger hole with all it would take to get the plumbing reattached.
No comments:
Post a Comment