Motivations and Understanding Kidney Donation

So I'm generally a kind-hearted person. I love helping in any way possible. I'm going to nursing school. I'm really close to my family. I'm actually trying to look into donating half my liver next, hopefully this- get that lined up for this upcoming year. So I just really love helping. So I wanted to do what I could… But for me, it's just about helping another person, just the humanity side of it, was what it was because its- some days, we all have our good days and our bad days. Some days, the world looks truly terrible. And I like to be a light in the dark, so to speak, on the-on the troublesome nights that this world's going through.

I was thinking to myself like, "That would just be awful, to go into the room and put your dialysis bag on the hook. And then he shuts the door-- and you know, he- you know, changing every fluid in him." And then I remember like, "Dad, let's go to the movie." And he was like, "How long is the movie?" Because I don't know how long- how often you have to change your dialysis, I think it's like every two hours, and so-or maybe three hours. I don't know, it depends. So I'm thinking to myself, "Man, Dad can't just sit in a movie theater and watch a movie with us because he's thinking, 'I need to change my dialysis' the whole time."

…The main reason I decided to is because I-I lost my brother to cancer almost six years ago and having that feeling of losing a sibling, it's not something you kind of just brush off and you know, it kind of sticks with you forever and I didn't want him to have to go through that. So when we got the tests back that, you know, we were a match, that night I ended up having this crazy dream about my older brother sitting next to me telling me you know if it was our family and we'd want anybody to help that could you know, that um- we'd want them to. So I did it for him and for kind of myself because she also is a mom of younger kids and since I have a three-year-old I figured you know us moms gotta stick together … I got the test results back that we were a match and all of my tests came back that I was healthy and it kind of made my decision on helping her a lot easier. And once it got closer to time it-- I was just more excited than I was anything else. It was just, you know, a lot of emotions.

My family has a history of bad kidneys. My brother, uhm, had polycystic kidney disease…And of course, the first thing he did was call me and say, "Go get an ultrasound," to make sure I didn't have it. And so that was about 10 years before we actually did the transplant. And he survived while he was going downhill that whole time. About 2008, early on, we uh, found out that his numbers were starting to drop a little more, and the doctor told him it was time to start considering either dialysis or transplant. And he called me.

…there's the directed kidney donation, which is to somebody that you know, whether it's family, friends, spouse, whoever it is. And that wasn't an option for me because I don't know anybody that needed a kidney…if you do the altruistic donation, you can choose to be anonymous, or you could choose to be in contact with the person that you donated…it didn't matter to me who is receiving my kidney. It was-it was someone who needed it. And that was more important to me than knowing who that person was…And one of the other things with the donation was that it created a chain of donations, which I thought was really cool. Uhm.. And so I think it ended up with my kidney going somewhere, and then that person's donor's kidney going somewhere and all over the country. And it-And at least one person in my state got a kidney as a result of this chain. And I thought that was really cool.