I’ve had an organ donor card in my wallet for as long as I can remember and I’ve always made it very clear to my loved ones that I want all my organs to be used when I die.
My question is, given that I only need one kidney, would it be better if I were to donate the other one right away rather than after my inevitable demise?
Obviously, my organs won’t be used in the unlikely event that I die in some unrecoverable way, like being lost at sea or something. And there’s always the possibility that a close relative might need a kidney at some point, so I should arguably save it for them.
Is there some other reason to do it now?
n0x0n@feddit.de 1 year ago
You’ve got 2 kidneys. You generously give one to someone in need.
You have 1 kidney. You now have a single point of failure, where you had redundancy before.
IT guy here, just in case that might have gibt unnoticed.
Zeus@lemm.ee 1 year ago
ah, but[^1] if you donate a kidney you go to the top of the queue
you’re losing one when you don’t need one, and receiving one when you do
insurance salesman here[^2], just in case that might have gibt unnoticed
[^1]: to the best of my knowledge
[^2]: obviously not
Oaksey@lemmy.world 1 year ago
But it won’t be your own kidney and you will have to take drugs to try and stop your body rejecting it.
Halafax@kbin.social 1 year ago
Source? When they proposed to do this for blood donors, it got shut down in a hurry.
poplargrove@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m guessing you didn’t manually insert those footnotes, how did you?
Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
On the plus side, someone else gets to continue existing.
Or from the IT perspective: I have two important servers, one has a single drive, the other has RAID mirroring. The drive in the first server fails. I could take a drive out of the server with RAID and have two functional servers or I could keep the second one running on its RAID and have a server with redundancy (that hopefully/might not be needed).
(I’m not going out and donating a kidney though, guess we can say it’s because I’m selfish.)
Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
But as OP points out, someone will get that kidney eventually anyway. So the difference is that a different someone else gets to continue existing.
Archpawn@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Counterpoint: If you’re an IT guy, you’re probably making enough money that you can donate mosquito nets and save tons of lives, and it’s not worth risking all that to save one more.