Kidney Recipient Quotes

Parents with dependents are somehow thought to count for more. If, for example, there is some scarce resource—a donor kidney perhaps—and of the two potential recipients one is a parent of young children and one is not, the parent, all things being equal, will likely be favoured. To let a parent die is not only to thwart that person’s preference to be saved, but also the preferences of his or her children that their parent be saved. It is quite true, of course, that the death of the parent will harm more people, but there is nonetheless something to be said against favouring parents. Increasing one’s value by having children might be like increasing one’s value by taking hostages.

The first transplant recipients did not die because their new kidneys failed, but rather because their bodies would not be fooled. Though the new kidney cells looked and acted in every respect like the old ones, they did not belong. Transplant surgeons must now give the recipient immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of the patient’s life

A woman on the other end, who had heard about him on the local news, told him that she hoped his remaining kidney would fail quickly and kill him, because her husband had been next in line to receive a kidney and he, Paul, had given his to someone else. Paul asked the hospital to turn his phone off after that, but then someone wrote an article about him in the Philadelphia Daily News, wondering whether it was fair for him to pick his recipient, choosing who lived and who died. He couldn’t understand it—he had heard about a sick woman who lived near him, and he had helped her. How could that make people angry?

It wasn’t until cyclosporine was discovered in 1976 that the balance between preventing rejection and avoiding infection greatly improved. That plus simultaneous efforts to figure out how to better match donors to recipients and the discovery of newer, better drugs over time has created the current reality in which more than two-thirds of all kidney transplants are still working after five years, while little more than a third of dialysis patients are still alive in that same time span. Some kidney transplants last twenty, thirty, forty, even fifty years.