Donations » Dr. A

DONATIONS » DR. A

They spent several million dollars — hitting the airwaves and social media with the ‘Save a life… give a kidney’ campaign. The uptick in people getting evaluated for donations was noticeable within the first week. More than ten times as many people (two thousand) discussed kidney donation with their doctor or transplant clinic in that week alone than the number of undirected donations in a normal year. That sounds like a pretty effective marketing campaign, but…

Of the two thousand, less than a quarter were allowed to donate. Many of the potential donors were excluded due to health conditions: diabetes, obesity, smoking, and even being physically unable to walk up an incline without getting winded. All of these are good predicters of deadly complications from the physical stress of surgery. Other of the donors could not deal with the financial hardship and potential job loss of being unable to work for four or more weeks. Since this was an elective procedure, it would not be considered a disability and employees would be at the whims of their employer.

Passing any laws to help with the financial issues would likely take years. An executive order would be faster if the president was on board. But both approaches required explaining why we suddenly had a desperate need, and opening the conversation with “We have had an insurrection from our vampires”… would likely be unwise.

So, if we accepted the current acceptance rate, we might get an additional thousand donated kidneys over the next year. More likely this would be much less as the pool of ‘adventurous angels’ (a reasonable term for someone willing to cut out one of their own organs to give it away) went dry. Of the tens of thousands that could die, one thousand would be saved by their fellow citizens and patriots.

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