Living Kidney Donors Are Among The Most Interesting People I Know

Allison Fass wrote about a speaker she saw in March who gave a talk on the characteristics of really interesting people. Here’s the list:

Reading this and Fass’ take on what those characteristics mean, I immediately think of living kidney donors. This group of people has these traits in buckets. Caring and generous are a given, of course—can you think of a more generous or caring act than to donate an organ? How do they meet the other eight criteria though? Here’s my take.

Adventurous
A living donor goes through months of medical tests and evaluations before they are deemed suitable to donate. Some of these tests could turn the stomachs of even the toughest folks. Have you ever been game to collect your urine and poop and carry it proudly to a clinic for evaluation? Have you ever been so fortunate as to see a bubble form on your arm right before your eyes where you’ve been poked for a Tuberculosis test?

Active
Donors need to be actively engaged in their physical and mental health. Candidates need to demonstrate that not only can their body survive without its spare filter, but that they are also in a good place to handle the stress of going through the testing and facing major surgery.

Strange
It’s a little unique to be walking around with only one kidney, but could you do it having given yours to a complete stranger? Through the science of living kidney donor paired exchanges, an exceptionally generous person can step forward to donate a kidney completely anonymously to whoever is on the waitlist that is a match. These “good Samaritans” are strangely awesome.

Humble
The amazing and beautiful thing about living donors is how quickly they will tell you that they don’t feel like heroes. These donors shrug the label off and will tell you that they would donate all over again if they could.

Daring
Giving up a kidney is no small matter, even for the healthiest person. Today’s donation surgeries can be performed laparoscopically which minimizes scarring and recovery time but this is still major surgery. Donors must then face a life knowing that even though they have been deemed likely to live a normal, healthy life with one kidney, if that one were to ever go down on them, they would be in the same serious trouble their recipient was in. It’s a decision that cannot be taken lightly.

Original
Some patients waiting for a kidney face dismal statistics about the likelihood of finding a match due to their blood type, antibodies and genetic makeup. But it can happen that a person who is 98% sensitized—that is, they would only find a match with 2% of the world’s population—gets a match. Often this happens with the help of the living donor paired exchange system or highly sensitized patient registries. The donors who match these patients certainly have a unique physical composition making them one in more than a million.

Brave
Every surgery comes with risk. Facing those risks takes great courage even when the motivator is to improve the life of a loved one.

Self-Assured
Donors will often consult their family and friends when deciding whether or not to donate. Some will be supportive of the idea, some may be cautious. Donors know in their hearts and minds what is right for them. They go into the OR alone believing that at the end of it all they will be able to get themselves back on their feet and back into life or at least that they will be able to handle whatever challenges life may throw at them on the other side.

How can you find one of these incredibly interesting people to have a conversation with? Kidney donors don’t stick out in public in any way, except for a small scar around the bikini line. You could go around looking for these markings at the beach or pool parties and then open a conversation with “I see your scar there, you must have great creatine levels”, but it’s not recommended. If you think you’re interesting though, you may just be a good candidate for donating yourself.

Jillian Barrott is the Communications Coordinator for Transplant Manitoba – Gift of Life Program and SignUpForLife.ca. She took up cycling with encouragement from a Transplant Manitoba volunteer who can ride 40km in a day and is living on a donated kidney he received 35 years ago.
To learn more about organ donation or being a living kidney donor:
www.transplantmanitoba.cawww.signupforlife.caLook for us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
www.facebook.com/transplantmanitoba@TransplantMB

Trip to Winkler Elementary School

The weather is slowly warming up here in Manitoba. When Kristin Millar and I travelled to Winkler last Thursday the skies were clear blue and the sun coming in the windows was strong enough to almost make us forget about the snow on the ground. Despite some delays due to GPS navigating issues, we were off to a good day, but we had no idea that it would be the kind of day that we’ll hold in our hearts for years to come.

Our trip to Winkler was prompted by a letter I’d received in the mail from a girl in grade 8 at Winkler Elementary School. Susie was doing a research project on organ donation and had a number of questions to ask. I started typing out a response to her but stopped decided it might be better if I could respond to Susie a little more directly.

I phoned the school and talked to Susie’s teacher, Ms Louise Fultz.

“We do presentations to schools, would you be interested in having us out some time?” I asked.

“That would be wonderful! Susie would love that,” Louise exclaimed. “You would travel all the way out here?”

“Yes, we do travel outside of Winnipeg. Organ donors can come from all over Manitoba, so we like to talk to as many Manitobans as we can,” I said. Louise said this news made her day. I laughed after hanging up the phone. If only it were this easy to make everyone’s day.

Kristin and I do presentations regularly to high schools and community groups. Sometimes we get a really great response with lots of questions and comments and sometimes the room is a bit quieter. We remind ourselves that even if we’ve made an impact on one person and inspired them to register for organ and tissue donation, we’ve potentially changed eight lives or more. Every donor counts.

When we got to Winkler and found our way to the school office, Susie was there to greet us. She showed us where we could hang out coats and offered us water to drink. She asked us for our full names and wrote this information into the blank spots in her introduction speech. Susie admitted to being nervous about getting up to speak in front of her classmates but her nerves didn’t show.

After the presentation we joined Susie and Louise for lunch. Susie said that it was the stories of the amazing people who received and donated organs that inspired her interest in the topic. I don’t know many eighth graders right now, but I don’t imagine Susie’s a typical one. Her thoughtful, intelligent question and curiosity about all things organ donation had Kristin and me impressed. There was a good dose of the more typical girl chatter though too. Over shared plates of cake, we also talked about family, the transition to high school and shoes. Susie loves shoes.

Organ donation is a gift, but the best part is that the giving doesn’t only happen in the operating room. Kristin and I have had the pleasure of meeting so many kind people through doing presentations. Susie and her teacher reminded both of us of ourselves and the important teachers and mentors we had growing up. The opportunity for us to give that back in some small way was incredibly satisfying and special.

A Gift Of Pure Love

 Helen and Julia with Dr. Rush at CJOB
studios

On Saturday I had the pleasure of joining the Manitoba OR Nurses Association conference as they had requested a living kidney donor transplant pair to speak about their experiences as patients. Julia received her sister Helen’s kidney last year. It was clear that this was a gift of pure love. Helen and Julia had the room both laughing and crying as they shared their stories. Afterward, many people came up to thank the ladies for sharing their perspectives. Karen, the conference organizer had this to say in an email to Helen this morning:

“I cannot begin to tell you how much positive feedback we received after your presentation. It was such a great feeling to hear your story. As an OR Nurse we rarely hear the end results and the life story of where you are now. That, as I stated, was the highlight of our day. You are to be commended for so much, and sharing your journey was a honour for us to experience. You are a great speaker. There was not a dry eye in the building that is for sure. As a nurse in a mechanical world sometimes, we absolutely love to know how our patients really do after the technical piece is completed.”

The beautiful part was that this was a gift for Helen too. In an email she wrote to Karen and me:

“Thank you both so much for giving me the opportunity to speak at the MORNA workshop to share my story and to give me an opportunity to acknowledge and thank the good work of the transplant program as well as the people at the HSC who helped along the way. Everyone was so warm and welcoming and I felt very honored to be there. Many people came up to us later to talk about their own personal tragedies that they were currently going through and it was so nice to be able to talk to them and offer them some encouragement and hope!”