Donating a kidney to a stranger was something that had been in my mind for a long time. I had been thinking about it for about a decade, at least.
I first heard about altruistic kidney donation on a podcast. One of the hosts explained about the ‘pairing scheme’, where one person could ‘unlock’ a chain of donations and up to three people’s lives could be saved by that one person’s decision. I found it absolutely fascinating! It lodged in my brain and I found myself always coming back to it.
Finally, as I was coming to the end of my career and thinking about what I could do to mark my retirement, the first thing that came to mind was – “I’ve always considered donating a kidney. Perhaps now is the time to look into it!” I contacted my local transplant unit in Bristol and things moved forward from there. I’ve always been a healthy person. I’ve never had any major illness so I wasn’t expecting the testing process to turn up anything untoward but it’s still nice to know everything is working well!
I told my family what I was planning on doing and they were quite taken by surprise at first, but after I explained everything they came around pretty quickly. They understood the benefits it could offer someone who needed my second kidney far more than I did. They quickly got behind me once they realised I had done my research and had answers to all their questions, like the risks involved and what to expect during the recovery period. I had done a lot of reading on the subject beforehand so felt really prepared (I only wish the www.donateakidney.co.uk was around when I was donating and I’m sure I would have read that too!).
It was quite a long process, longer than I initially expected. It was over a year before all the tests were done and I was told I could donate a kidney. I had just missed one of the matching runs that they do to match non-directed donors to people in need of a kidney, and had to wait a few months for the next one. But there were no big issues along the way, just pushing through the process.
