The Man Who Gave Me His Kidney

Brenda explained it to me slow, because I was crying too hard to take it in. There are people in this world, she said, rare people, who walk into a hospital and donate a kidney to no one in particular. They do not know who will get it. They will never be told the name. They just give it, to the pool, to whoever is the best match at the top of the list when their kidney is ready. They are called non-directed donors, or altruistic donors, and there are not many of them, and one of them had come through the University program, and the tissue match to me was so good, better than a sibling, that the surgeons could hardly believe it.

A stranger had given me a kidney. Somebody I had never met, would never meet, had lain down on a table and let a surgeon take an organ out of their own healthy body and carry it down the hall and put it into mine.

I was in surgery two days later. I was twenty-four years old.

I will not pretend I can describe what it is to wake up well. The closest I can come is this: the morning after the transplant, before the pain had set in good, a nurse held a cup of water to my lips and I drank it, and I started to cry, because for two years I had not been allowed to drink when I was thirsty. Fluid was poison to me when my kidneys did not work. I had measured every swallow. And now there was a stranger’s kidney working inside me, making urine, which the nurses celebrated like it was the Second Coming, and I could drink a cup of water because I was thirsty, like a normal person, like I was twenty-four and alive.

I asked, of course. I asked everyone who came into that room who had given it to me. They told me what they were allowed to tell me, which was almost nothing. The donor had chosen to stay anonymous. I could write a letter, if I wanted, and the program would pass it along without any identifying information, and if the donor ever chose to write back, they could, but many never did, and I should not expect it, and I should not go looking, because that was the deal the donor had made and it was sacred.

I wrote the letter. I wrote it a dozen times and threw most of them away. How do you thank a person for your life? In the end I kept it simple. I told them I was a young woman from a small town, that I waited tables, that my father had died when I was nineteen and my mother was my whole heart, that I had spent two years tied to a machine and had stopped believing anything good would come, and that they had proven me wrong. I told them I did not know their name and never would, but that I would spend whatever years they had given me trying to live a life worth the gift. I wrote that last line and I meant it like a vow. I will try to live a life worth the gift.