I’ve had an organ donor card in my wallet for as long as I can remember and I’ve always made it very clear to my loved ones that I want all my organs to be used when I die.
My question is, given that I only need one kidney, would it be better if I were to donate the other one right away rather than after my inevitable demise?
Obviously, my organs won’t be used in the unlikely event that I die in some unrecoverable way, like being lost at sea or something. And there’s always the possibility that a close relative might need a kidney at some point, so I should arguably save it for them.
Is there some other reason to do it now?
You’ve got 2 kidneys. You generously give one to someone in need.
You have 1 kidney. You now have a single point of failure, where you had redundancy before.
IT guy here, just in case that might have gibt unnoticed.
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If I ever end up in a coma with little hope of recovery, I want them to unplug me. And then plug me back again.
But it won’t be your own kidney and you will have to take drugs to try and stop your body rejecting it.
Source? When they proposed to do this for blood donors, it got shut down in a hurry.
of course they do: they've only got one kidney, so it's more important for them to get a replacement quickly
alright, i was being facetious. a cursory search [says(https://healthmanagement.org/c/icu/news/organ-donors-who-need-kidneys-go-to-top-of-transplant-list) this, but it’s the states only, and i have no idea if it’s true or not. i imagine not, but i don’t know
If you read the articles you linked, you’ll notice some specifically fishy language. Neither one says that donors are promised first dibs, only that they often get it. If it’s not written down, you have nothing if they decide to do it differently.
i know. like i said, i don’t believe it
i was just trying to be funny : (
I’m guessing you didn’t manually insert those footnotes, how did you?
lemmy supports two footnote formats
the basic type like so:
comment body here[^1] [^1]: and the footnote at the very bottom of the commentor the easy to write type
comment body here^[and the inline footnote](note the different locations for the caret)
keep in mind that they don’t work on most apps, and some frontends
Very cool, thanks for sharing!
no worries, here’s the actual documentation. apparently there’s a third syntax that i never use as well
You now have a single point of failure, where you had redundancy before.
On the plus side, someone else gets to continue existing.
Or from the IT perspective: I have two important servers, one has a single drive, the other has RAID mirroring. The drive in the first server fails. I could take a drive out of the server with RAID and have two functional servers or I could keep the second one running on its RAID and have a server with redundancy (that hopefully/might not be needed).
(I’m not going out and donating a kidney though, guess we can say it’s because I’m selfish.)
Unless you’re running RAID 0 (stripe), then you’d lose everything by pulling one of the drives.
I don’t recommend using RAID 0 for kidneys.
Counterpoint: If you’re an IT guy, you’re probably making enough money that you can donate mosquito nets and save tons of lives, and it’s not worth risking all that to save one more.
But as OP points out, someone will get that kidney eventually anyway. So the difference is that a different someone else gets to continue existing.
But as OP points out, someone will get that kidney eventually anyway.
OP erroneously thought that but it’s not actually correct. The conditions where someone dies but their kidney is viable for a transplant are rare.
I mean, I only get 65% normal function out of both kidneys pumping at full capacity so giving away one would likely put me down to 33% which is in the “you need dialysis every week if not more often” range. Don’t set yourself on fire just because you think you might help someone out for a few years.
If you live to a ripe old age your 80+ year old kidney probably won’t be viable for transplant.
A kidney donated from a living donor often lasts longer and performs better than a kidney from a deceased donor. Donating a kidney to a stranger can begin a paired donation chain that can result in several people getting kidneys. If you are seriously thinking about donating, I strongly encourage you to do some research with reputable sources, talk to some people who’ve donated themselves, talk it over with your loved ones, and maybe talk to some transplant coordinators at the nearest transplant center. It’s not something to be undertaken lightly, but living donors are saints.
Thanks for the links! I wasn’t thinking about it all that seriously (this post is the first time I’ve mentioned it to anyone) but it’s interesting to know that it could do a lot more good than my previous plan of just… waiting till I die.
