08/25/2024
Article from Today’s Newsweek that has Quickly Gone Viral.
A friend for over 60 years (McLean ‘65, PHS ‘70) is the 14th person who has offered me a kidney since I admitted a couple of years ago that I was going to need one soon to “beat the reaper.” Unfortunately, just a few days ago my transplant clinic found some reason Paul didn’t qualify to be a donor for me, though he came closer to making it than anyone else to date. He aced every test in the transplant gauntlet, but one.
Like most, but not all, of the people who have tried to donate their extra kidney to keep me alive—including my brother, who volunteered to be a living donor the day he found out I desperately needed one—, Paul and I go way back. This means he is a baby boomer, like me, and like 13 of my 14 other would-be kidney donors.
By now, all but a very lucky few of us baby boomers will have some technical age related reason that is going to prevent them from being a living donor for me, including taking some med that makes them ineligible, like taking more than one blood pressure medication, a too recent bout with cancer, a kidney or heart issue, now or in the past, etc.
The transplant clinics have a long list of tests to pass before they will let a person donate a kidney, because they won’t to be darn sure that the person is not going to need it an the future and won’t have complications from the surgery, or at least that the odds are as remote as possible. This is important, because, like the clinics, I too don’t want any donor of mine to have a need to regret making the sacrifice.
I will post a link in a moment to my micro-web site that Medical City helped me setup two that people wanting to donate can see if they might be eligible.
As always, I am irrationally exuberant that I am going to make it somehow.
Thanks for reading everybody!
Noel
"I had a healthy kidney, and someone out there needed it," said Brady Silverwood, who donated his organ to a stranger.
