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Recreational Organ Removal
I am donating a kidney to a total stranger next week. My dad isn’t overly thrilled with this idea. He just doesn’t understand why I’d give up a perfectly good organ to someone that I’ve never met, and will never meet.
“Half of me is really proud and the other half is scared”, he gestures dramatically with his fork from across the diner table. Apparently it’s the left-hand side of him that’s proud.
I’ve already pointed out to him that this really isn’t even the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done. The risk of complications is a fraction of a percent. 1 in 4 women in Canada are sexually assaulted. There were 40 vehicle collisions per 10,000 licensed drivers, causing injury or death in Alberta in 2016. I do an awful lot of driving and I am a woman. These two simple things are inherently more dangerous than donating an organ under the scrupulous care of skilled surgeons after rigorous rounds of testing.
This lead to the term “recreational organ removal”. Coined, of course, by my slightly eccentric father. He likes to create descriptive names for things. My puppy is my “furry little endorphin generator” and I am frequently asked to “embiggen” documents so he can read them without his reading glasses. Naming things gives the namer a sense of power and control. Referring to my surgery as “recreational organ removal” makes it sound less clinical and intimidating.
Working as a project manager means that I’ve had to give everyone a fair warning that I will be missing work post-op and that my attendance in the workplace is dependent on how quickly I recover. I was expecting some confusion and disbelief. What I wasn’t expecting was a backlash. While nobody blinks at the people who take time off for vacation or travelling, my time off for surgery is somehow lesser. I’m not scared of surgery, I’m scared of not being given the time I will need to recover.
All this fear and drama begs to ask the question: why. Why donate a kidney at all? Well, I initially volunteered to do a paired exchange for the sister of a friend when none of her family members were viable donors at the time. Unfortunately, that fell through. But I had done enough research into living donation to know that it was something I wanted to do. Kidneys from living donors have longer lifespans and begin to work immediately after…
