http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16kidney-t.html?pagewanted=all
You don't need both of yours, why not check into GIVING SOMEONE BACK HIS LIFE by offering your spare?
Theoretically, kidneys should be in booming supply. Virtually everyone has two, and healthy individuals can give one away and still lead perfectly normal lives.
Yet people aren’t exactly lining up to give.
At the beginning of 2005, when I put my name on the list, there were about 60,000 people ahead of me; by the end of that year, only 1 in 9 had received one from a relative, spouse or friend.
Today, just under 74,000 people are waiting for kidneys.
I found the article interesting, a bit surprising in how little it mirrored my experience.
A potential donor "needed to talk it over with her husband but thought it would be fine."
(A step I almost forgot until it was insultingly late.)
But then a knowledgeable friend "talked her out of it."
The knowledgeable friend, a transplant surgeon seems merely to have informed her about some of the risks.
The "chance of death [that is so] tiny" the recipient poo-poohs it even as she reports it?
Put it this way.
Imagine something you want or need -- say the amount of money it would take, however many millions, to change your life and the lives of everyone you love, utterly and irrevocably for the better. Now double it, just to make the reward of this step you're about to take really meaningful. Okay? And there it is for the taking, on that table. Oh, one problem... it is attached to a bomb. And there is a chance, one in 5,000, that it will blow up and kill you. So yeah, that means that there is a 4,999 in 5,000 chance everything will be fine.
I don't know how you can call someone else's 1 in five thousand chance of death "tiny," frankly.
Let me say right now, I don't know if that is even an accurate statistic.
And it is certainly one I can call tiny. I'm entitled. But she, frankly, does not have that right.
I am also taken aback at her supposition that no one who is squeamish about blood and pain would step up to the plate.
She doesn't know anyone with a greater aversion to needles than I, or a bigger wuss about pain.
I am not sure how I feel about this:
Altruism is a beautiful virtue, but it has fallen painfully short of its goal. We must be bold and experiment with offering prospective donors other incentives for giving, not necessarily payment but material reward of some kind — perhaps something as simple as offering donors lifelong Medicare coverage. Or maybe Congress should grant waivers so that states can implement their own creative ways of giving something to donors: tax credits, tuition vouchers or a contribution to a giver’s retirement account.
In short, we should reward individuals who relinquish an organ to save a life because doing so would encourage others to do the same. Yes, splendid people like Virginia will always be moved to rescue in the face of suffering, and I did get my kidney. But unless we stop thinking of transplantable kidneys solely as gifts, we will never have enough of them.
Not at all sure...
But the concept of “tyranny of the gift” she goes into fascinates me.
Because what developed is a sort of dread, not of the recipient's gratitude, but of that of one of her relatives. And it is not only I who suffer from it, but Himself.
This was as nearly as close to anonymous as any other altruistic donation could be, didn't know the family before, have only discovered third and fourth degree connections since (everyone in town, but us, is related...) and we have virtually nothing in common.
We meet for dinner once a year, if they remember.
The author is correct about the satisfaction of the donor. I suppose there is a bit of vanity in it -- it fulfilled my expectations of the person I pretend to be.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, yeah.
Donate your organs.
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