We’re Not Selfish

I am a week out from donating a kidney to my friend Allison. It’s a strange thing when people find out I did this; there’s a weird reverence some people have that frankly makes me uncomfortable, but there’s a surprising amount of people who look more than a little frightened, and others who straight up tell me they “could never do it.” This last reaction is odd to me, because if someone you care about is on dialysis, it’s pretty difficult for me to believe you wouldn’t do everything you can to help them. Dialysis is a three days a week, four hours a session process. It saps you of your energy, leaves you in near constant pain, and is no guarantee to replace kidney function forever. You are technically alive, but not really living a life. I refuse to believe that most people reading this wouldn’t do whatever was in their power to give a close friend or family member a better quality of life than this. Already, Allison’s kidney function is better than it has been since 1996. She’s already off the waitlist for a kidney, which means someone got to move up in line behind her and take her place. She will live a richer and fuller life now, and someone neither of us even know has better shot at one, too.

I certainly understand a knee-jerk fear of surgery, but the hospital that performed our transplant has a 98% success rate and has never lost a donor in the operation. I did not die from this process, and aside from some minor changes to my diet, in the long term I will live a perfectly normal life. The immediate week after giving the kidney has not been easy, the pain isn’t that bad, but the nausea has been unbelievable at times, and let me tell you, vomiting with a stomach full of stitches is no picnic. But I will be fine within six weeks max, I already feel much better just seven days out. When it comes down to it, I don’t think people are that afraid of losing a non-vital organ or going through surgery, I think it’s really that most Americans are afraid of our healthcare system and all the terrifying expenses that lurk within it.

This is the only time in my life where I could possibly imagine being able to do this. Not because I find myself feeling uniquely brave, but because I financially couldn’t pull it off were it not for the bizarre circumstances forced on us by the Coronavirus. I’ve been unemployed since November of 2020, with expanded federal unemployment paying most of my bills. Because I’m unemployed and because I know I can rely on federal unemployment to cover me until at least September, I can afford to take the roughly six weeks it will take to fully recover from the surgery without worrying about being let go from my job or losing income to cover rent into September. (To anyone out there screeching about how expanded federal unemployment is a blight on the country, it’s directly the reason why I was able to donate this kidney, so kindly go fuck yourself.) Additionally, I’m extremely fortunate that a fund known as the National Living Donor Association covered all my travel expenses to get from LA to Long Island, my mom’s flight from Colorado, and a twelve day stay in the Saskatuket Holiday Inn Express. Most working adults in this country simply could not afford to do something like this, which I think is a tragic, systemic failure.

But the thing I can’t let go of now that I’ve done this is that it did work out for me to do this thing. I was willing to get tested and see if I was a match, and all the other things that had to fall in place in order to make that happen fell into place. This wasn’t an easy thing to do, but it’s really impossible to describe how incredible it feels knowing I just saved my friend’s life. I put myself out there and got rewarded with an unshakable awareness that I have materially made things better. I feel an immense gratitude that this happened, that a huge team of medical professionals was able to keep me alive so I could give this gift. I’m really grateful to my mom for being here with me and taking care of me. No single experience has made it clearer to me how interdependent we all are on one another, and how amazing it is that human beings can work together to accomplish unbelievable feats of scientific triumph. The fear was ultimately worth it.

The shit that feels really scary and insurmountable when you consider really meaningfully helping another person will always be there. I don’t expect most people reading this to ever be in a situation where they’ll be asked to donate a kidney, but I do think as our world continues to get demonstrably worse, we’re all going to have moments where fear overwhelms our desire to help other people. It’s been rough being stuck in a hotel room while recovering from surgery, with nothing but news about how much worse the climate crisis is getting, how far the Delta variant is spreading, and news that the federal eviction moratorium is expiring. But I also got to spend all weekend watching Cori Bush use her position as a first time US representative and camp out on the capitol steps to demand that the eviction moratorium be extended and she pulled that off. People do crazy brave shit all the time, the world turns on it at the end of the day.

I’m here to tell you that you can plunge through that fear and find a deeper well of love and joy than you thought was possible, and you should push yourself through it if you can. The homeless person on your street might have more problems than you can solve, but they also might just need a friendly neighbor with WiFi to help them figure out accessing services to get into housing. Going to that protest against the police might get violent, you might get arrested, but there will also be other people there to bail you out and patch you up. Protecting someone from getting evicted might be scary, but if you pull it off someone gets to stay in their house at the end of the day. I don’t think we’re naturally selfish, I think most of us at our cores know that we’re on this planet to take care of each other, there’s just a lot of fear and bullshit that clouds that most of the time. I can promise you I’m not uniquely gifted to face the fear, any of us can do it when the time really comes, and I sincerely hope when the time comes for you you’ll face it too.