Sharing a different surplus

Fred Ashmore writes about his experience of donating a kidney

In Yearly Meeting 2015 an important theme was ‘sharing our surplus’. We talked about various ways of doing this: by contributing money, sharing a home, voluntary work for charities and in the community, and a range of other options. One of the odder possibilities was a different type of sharing: sharing good health by donating a live kidney. The person giving ministry (me) had a friend who had recently given one kidney in an altruistic donation to an unknown recipient.

Good grief! You might say, how is that sharing a surplus? However, as a healthy adult I don’t need two kidneys. One of them was – literally – surplus to my requirements. Inspired by the example of my friend I recently donated it. I will get by very well on one kidney. The remaining one will happily ‘carry the load’ for my foreseeable life. I know this because the ability to do very well on one kidney – excellent kidney function – is the first of the checks for a possible donor.

Thousands of donations

The practice of donation is well established these days and thousands of donations are made every year around the world. There are about 1,000 live donations a year in the United Kingdom. Most kidney donations are paired, that is between family members or people known to each other.

There is also a pooled donation system, which can give a multiplied yield of happiness. Supposing a person, A, who needs a new kidney, has a willing but incompatible family donor, B. If an altruistic donor can be found for A, then family donor B can give their kidney (through the pooling system) to someone else who needs a kidney and is compatible with B. The result is more people with a revitalised system and able to enjoy life again. An altruistic donation can ‘enable’ on average 4.6 other donations. The smart medicine impresses me and the thought of the amount of pain and suffering relieved gives a benevolent glow.

Goodbye little kidney (about 140g of amazing organ). Thank you for your many years of faithful service keeping my bloodstream clean and balanced, dealing with waste products, plus a few other ‘bibs and bobs’. I never even noticed you. I am so very happy that you settled in well and resumed duty for your now owner. I am told that the effect will be life-transforming, freeing someone from triweekly visits to hospital or a clinic for lengthy dialysis, making possible things never envisaged, things I have taken for granted. I am told that kidney disease makes the sufferer feel rotten most of the time. Could something so simple change your whole view of life?

Transformation

When I was admitted for the donation I had a little while to hang around in the day room of the ward. A pleasant young man called Jack came in and struck up conversation. He turned out to be a friend of our daughter, and he was a recent recipient of a kidney donation coming in for a check-up. I asked him whether his donation had been good for him, and he blinked in amazement that I found it necessary to ask. He had been facing a life going steadily downhill from kidney disease. His developing professional career in field archaeology had crumbled as he was locked in to three sessions of dialysis each week just to stay alive. His prospects were poor and his life very constrained by his condition. Now, after his donation, his life was coming back together, he could resume work and think about a life of opportunities that he might be able to enjoy.

There are thousands and thousands of people in the UK who suffer from kidney disease. At this very moment, there are at least 5,000 individuals for whom a live kidney donation would be life transforming. The alternatives are hobbling, painful, time-consuming and the prospects depressing. Also, the other ways are expensive even in a carefully managed NHS – tens of thousands of pounds a year. One estimate that I heard of the financial benefit of a kidney donation is about £1,000,000 – a sum which surprised me. And kidney disease is linked to a much higher risk of cardiovascular and other conditions as well.

A beneficial act

My friend, who gave a kidney in 2015, knew only that her donation had gone to a forty-five-year-old mother of four. Bare facts, but anyone with children will immediately feel the value of being freed to resume a normal life, of a good prospect of seeing her children grow into adults and have their own children. I did not know anything about the recipient of my kidney – male, female, age, ethnicity, social stuff. That was OK. I had my feel-good reward when I talked to Jack in the day room. Shortly before this article was published my recipient sent me (anonymously) a card of grateful thanks. Life has better moments, I suppose, but that’s good enough for me.

Did I think about this decision spiritually, as any Quaker is likely to want to? It didn’t seem to be a complex question that needed checking against the testimonies. I felt that there were some questions about the burden on others and maybe emotional concerns for my family, though they have been very supportive. There are some risks from the donation operation and a small increase in other risks over my lifetime. I don’t expect to be impaired in any major way over the long term.

Of course, there are negative possibilities galore that include rejection of the transplant, subsequent failure, and disease. An adult will recognise that these disappointments could lie in wait – and satisfy him or herself that they could be handled emotionally. I thought about all these possibilities before signing the consent forms, both in advance and on the day of my donation – and signed willingly. Living kidney donation, properly prepared, offers a high likelihood of a successful outcome for both recipient and donor.

So, why have I written about this? Friends, some of us might like to consider whether this immensely beneficial act might be for them. It is, truly, altruistic; it is likely to be life-transforming for the recipient. If you are acceptable as a donor, it is, truly, sharing a surplus.

Altruism expresses one of our highest potentials as human beings, a disinterested wish for the welfare of another, and this form seems to me to have some excellent qualities of immediacy of benefit to the other and, in my experience, relatively small suffering.

Further information: www.giveakidney.org

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