Virginia Postrel
Here’s Looking at You, Kidney
How and why I became an organ donor— and how I kept people from talking me out of it.
(Page 2 of 2)
I was to be the backup to “Bob from Canada,” a guy Sally had found via matchingdonors.com, a site for people looking for organ donors. The mysteriously generous Bob was our hero. (My husband was particularly fond of him.) But in mid-December, Sally suddenly lost touch with him. “I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick the freaking football and Lucy keeps yanking it away,” Sally e-mailed, asking me to get some basic blood and urine tests done in Dallas. By early January Bob was gone. A busy life had interfered with his good intentions.
Soon I was at the Washington Hospital Center, in D.C., filling lots of blood vials to make sure I had no diseases my kidney might pass along. I got an X-ray and an electrocardiogram. On a later trip, I met with a social worker, a nephrologist, and the surgeon, and I had a CT scan to confirm that I really had two healthy kidneys and determine which was the better of the two to take (in my case, the right).
The screening process was peculiarly gratifying. My brothers climb mountains and run marathons, and my parents work out with personal trainers three times a week, which makes me the family couch potato. My primary form of exercise is walking to restaurants. But compared with most would-be kidney donors—the not-so-healthy relatives of very sick people—I was a paragon of fitness: blood pressure on the low end of normal, no hepatitis C, no diabetes, an abdomen that these days passes for slim. (Laparoscopic surgery is more difficult, and sometimes impossible, if the donor is obese.) Everyone at the hospital was impressed. Yea for me!
Most important, it turned out, I had the right personality. Donating a kidney isn’t, in fact, a matter of just showing up. You have to be pushy. Unless you’re absolutely determined, you’ll give up, and nobody will blame you—except, of course, the person who needs a kidney. When I went to see my Dallas doctor for preliminary tests, the first thing she said was “You know, you can change your mind.”
To me, giving Sally a kidney was a practical, straightforward solution to a serious problem. It was important to her but not really a big deal to me. Until the surgery was scheduled—for Saturday, March 4—and I started telling people about it, I had no idea just how weird I was.
Normal people, I found, have a visceral—pun definitely intended—reaction to the idea of donating an organ. They’re revolted. They identify entirely with the donor but not at all with the recipient. They don’t compare kidney donation to other risky behavior, like flying a plane or running 31 miles to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back, as my brother did last summer.
I was scared, of course—but of the surgery, not the loss of my kidney. I’d never been hospitalized before and, except for oral surgery when I was seven, had never had general anesthesia. Surgery, no matter how routine, is dangerous. The kidney is fed by a large renal artery and drained by a large renal vein. If the surgeon cut the wrong one, he’d have five seconds before I bled to death. (I didn’t share this tidbit with my husband until after the operation.)
I did my taxes early so my husband wouldn’t be stuck sorting through my business receipts if I were incapacitated, or worse. I arranged to stay at a friend’s Washington crash pad. I asked the transplant coordinator to tell me, step-by-step, exactly what would happen once I got to the hospital so there would be no surprises.
Things went pretty much as advertised. One minute Sally and I were on beds being wheeled down the hall. I was nervous for about two seconds.
And then I woke up. My husband and parents were there, looking relieved. The nurse took off my oxygen mask so they could feed me ice chips—not too many or I’d throw up. Eventually I moved on to water and clear foods, including tea to fight caffeine withdrawal. Sally had arranged a huge hotel-style room for me, complete with a sofa bed for my husband and real meals. He ate steak while I sipped broth and slurped lime Jell-O.
Yes, I did throw up. Three times and quite violently—a reaction to the anesthesia. I got used to answering a list of excretory questions, starting with “Have you passed gas?” After 24 hours on a catheter, my body refused for a while to urinate on command. When I learned to pee again, the nurse did a victory dance. All in all, it was a very dignified experience.
The worst moment was an early-morning visit by a grave, haggard surgeon—not mine but Sally’s. What if Sally had died? What if giving her a kidney had killed her? I’d never seriously considered that possibility.
To my great relief, the surgeon said my friend was okay. But she had had a close call. She’d started hemorrhaging. They’d had to take her back into surgery to stop the bleeding. He’d done hundreds of these operations, and this had never happened. Sally was in intensive care. It had been a very long night.
A day later, when I was off my IV and able to walk through the hospital, we visited Sally. A tiny woman, she looked like a baby bird, with her short hair shooting up randomly and her skin slightly gray. She was groggy, a bit grouchy, and not entirely coherent. But she knew one thing clearly: “I almost died,” she said.
On Tuesday we visited her again before leaving the hospital. She was still in the ICU but about to be moved. She looked like herself. She was talking to friends on her cell phone. What a relief.
Sally left the hospital the following Sunday, the day I had my surgical staples removed. We joined her and a couple of friends for a messy hamburger lunch at her apartment. The next day, we flew home to Dallas.
I never had much pain and, once I left the hospital, took nothing stronger than aspirin, which my surgeon prescribed to prevent blood clots. But it took me about three weeks—longer than I expected—to get back to normal. The surgery had left me easily exhausted. Always a sleepy person, I was taking four-hour naps and falling behind on my deadlines.
Then suddenly I was myself again, with only an occasional twinge in what my husband calls the KV (for “kidney void”) to remind me of my medical adventure. I caught up with my work and started traveling—short trips, with light luggage. My all-purpose excuse, “I just donated a kidney,” had expired.
On April 10, less than six weeks after the surgery, Sally too went back to work. “I am waiting to be exhausted but I am not . . . darn,” she wrote. “I may be back to normal. Don’t think I am nuts but I liked being home and having everyone make a fuss.”
She was finally better than before the operation. Her new kidney was working perfectly, she was no longer anemic, and she no longer had to take five medicines to ward off hypertension. I had never thought much of my kidney when I had it, but now it makes me proud.
She signed the e-mail “Spoiled in D.C.”
Pages: 1 2
My Library
