A drop in the Salvation Army bucket during the holidays, five cents donated through to your grocery bill for bringing reusable bags. It’s pretty easy to donate without a second thought.
But what about giving someone a kidney?
The demand certainly is there. Kidneys are, by far, the most in-demand organ—as of Dec. 26, 109,789 people were on the national waiting list. And on Dec. 4, a change to the way kidneys are allocated went into effect. Instead of pulling matches from the list solely on a first-come, first-served basis, the United Network for Organ Sharing (1) system now uses longevity matching (2) for its kidney recipients. It could be a huge boon for younger people seeking a kidney.
“I’m nearly 68; if I was the next person up on the waiting list for a kidney and we had a 20-year-old donor, I would get that kidney. Yet two people below me sits [another] 20-year-old. Who’s gonna live longer with that 20-year-old kidney?” said Doug Penrod, registered nurse and outreach coordinator for Northwestern Medicine’s Comprehensive Transplant Center, explaining the flaw addressed by the change. “Since the amount of organs hasn’t really significantly increased, but the demand has hugely increased, we needed to do a better job with what we have.”
Penrod himself is a kidney donor, having participated in a four-way domino paired exchange (3) in 2008. No, he didn’t have a prior friendship with the woman he donated to, and no, they don’t really keep up these days.
“I had no idea who I donated to until the next day,” he said. “And that in some ways may have made it somewhat easier emotionally to do this whole thing and then not have concerns about, well, is she taking care of my kidney OK? Is she treating it good? Or me worrying about, oh God, did I give her a good enough kidney?”
John Friedewald, a transplant nephrologist and director of clinical research for Northwestern’s Comprehensive Transplant Center, said that even though the hospital is a big transplant center, they only see non-directed donors (4) like Penrod “a couple of times a year.”
“Oftentimes, they’re either people who have been touched by transplant in some way, right, ‘My friend got a transplant and it was really cool and I wanna donate,’ or … people who are serial blood donors and want to do more,” said Friedewald, who was chairman of the United Network for Organ Sharing UNOS kidney committee when the new allocation policy was passed. “Some people just do that because they think it’s important.”
Source: Hilary Higgins/RedEye
But a couple of times a year isn’t going to put a dent in the list. “It’s like I tell people, if we didn’t put another person on the list starting today, it would take us eight and a half years to transplant everybody with the current organ supply,” Penrod said. “So how are we ever gonna catch up and do that?”
Dispelling myths will certainly help. Friedewald said Hollywood doesn’t do doctors a whole lot of favors when it comes to sensational stories, and Joe Barrett, who donated a kidney 18 years ago, rattled off a laundry list of wacky comments he’s gotten, from how much the surgery must have hurt to how much it must have cost him to donate.
“What I did was absolutely nothing. It didn’t shorten my life, it didn’t hurt, it wasn’t bad for me,” he said. “Everybody goes, ‘Oh, you donated a kidney,’ like it’s a big deal. It’s nothing. And if we could get it across to everybody that it’s nothing, by next week we could have 60,000 people off of dialysis.”
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“This is where we do our ‘Seinfeld’ bit,” replied Brad Szczecinski, who received Barrett’s kidney. “It’s like, where [Jerry Seinfeld] is like ‘This show’s about nothing!’ Well, it’s about something, it is something … but the procedures have gotten significantly more streamlined. There’s one small incision and two little pinholes and the donors are, sometimes can be out the same day, usually the next day they’re back out, and they’re back to work a day or two after that … but it really is pretty seamless, pain-free procedure.“
(1) The nonprofit organization that manages the nation’s organ transplant system
(2) Pairing the organ with the person likely to use it for the longest time
(3) A connected series of transplants involving four donors and four recipients
(4) Someone who gives a kidney to a random person in need
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FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT DONATING
>> The United Network for Organ Sharing provides detailed information about the process of becoming a living donor at unos.org.
>> Gift of Hope, the organ and tissue donation network serving northern Illinois and northwest Indiana, provides a list of local transplant centers at giftofhope.org.