Why I Donated a Kidney

The end of July marked the five year anniversary of my kidney donation to my buddy Allison. Below is an essay I wrote shortly before I made the donation. Reading it back, it’s striking how all the things I was thinking about are still things that motivate me today. Going through the process didn’t so much change me as it did remind me of the depths of compassion and solidarity we’re all capable of. It helped me to double down on all the things I value most in this life. You may never get an opportunity to donate a kidney, but I hope you’ll take a moment to consider what you’re willing to give to support life-sustaining movements and resist death making institutions.

25 felt too young to lose multiple friends in one year. I wasn’t running around with people who do heroin or anything like that, no one around me was playing fast and loose with their own life. And yet, it was only February of 2019 and my friend David had died after complications from what should have been a routine, outpatient back surgery. David was a comrade, someone I had done organizing with, and someone I respected immensely. He was a lawyer and he had this knack for crafting these bullet-proof arguments when it came to arguing for the best course of action to build towards working class liberation. His spirit was so intense and so genuine, he was just a fountain of knowledge and inspiration, and all of a sudden he was gone. Saying goodbye to him was surreal; some sense of spirit, of hope of the better world worth fighting for evaporated inside of me as I thanked him for everything he’d taught me at his bedside in Cedars Sinai.

He hadn’t been dead more than a few weeks when Allison started to get worse. We’d been roommates for a couple years and mostly friends, but things were rocky between us then. After David died, I broke up with the person I had been seeing and got back together with my ex. It’s hard to explain why, it just seemed like the right thing to do in my shock. Allison didn’t get along with my ex, so we started avoiding each other. This ended up being awful timing, because Allison’s kidneys were starting to fail. She had had a kidney disease her whole life, doctors had told her her kidneys would give out eventually, and she had been working part time as a server at Maggiano’s, barely scraping by and definitely not seeing a doctor like she needed to.

Both her mental and physical health began to decline at an alarming rate; she stopped being able to work, she was throwing up at 3 a.m. every single night. She already had a huge amount of medical debt from the last time her kidneys had acted up, so convincing her to go to the emergency room was an uphill battle. In her addled state, she couldn’t figure out how to navigate Medi-Cal and unemployment to qualify for benefits, and she was too proud to let me help her. To top it all off, her relationship with her parents was far from stellar, so I couldn’t even convince her to go to her family for support. I’m ashamed of how that month went, me trying to figure out how to get through to her how serious this situation clearly was, while also feeling conflicted because our relationship was at a stalemate. I knew things were very bad, but at the time I didn’t fully understand how bad her kidney disease was, and for whatever reason I thought she really might be able to sleep this thing off and rally back to normal. Ultimately, it took almost a full month of begging, yelling (while trying not to yell), and sending a barrage of Facebook messages while I was at work to finally get her to contact her estranged mother to figure out a treatment plan for her.

Within one day of Allison getting in touch with her mom, a plan rapidly fell into place for Allison’s mom and stepdad to fly to LA from New York, rent a van, pack up as many of Allison’s possessions as possible, and bring her back to New York for medical treatment. Her mom knew this day was a likely possibility; she’d been planning for it for most of her daughter’s life. Allison had next to no money, but she cashed out what little money was in her 401k and covered rent for June to buy me a month to clear all our shit out of the apartment and find somewhere else to live. In the blink of an eye, she was gone.

I’m lucky to belong to a tight-knit internet community of working class weirdos who saved my ass that month. I explained the situation I was in and was able to fundraise $1,000 from my friends, which was the only way I could afford all the expenses that come with moving, and was able to give Allison some money to cover her own trip across the country. June became a desperate month where every moment that wasn’t spent at work was in one way or another devoted to clearing our apartment out. My ex and I fought a lot during this time, with her saying I should just abandon the apartment in the terrible state it was in, and me explaining that security deposits are important to get back when you make just above minimum wage. I repainted walls, donated and threw away mountains of furniture, and miraculously found a new, better place to live. I had too much to do to feel much of anything, but in the rare moments where I was alone with my thoughts, I was filled with a blinding fury. An anger that I had come desperately close to watching a second friend die in a year due to this country’s inexcusable healthcare system. A rage that poverty in this country is treated like the changing of the tides, a part of nature there’s simply nothing any of us can do anything about.

After the awful whirlwind of June, I found myself settled in a crusty old house with a bunch of guys, suddenly just a quick train ride away from my office, with a backyard for my cats to frolic in. The jarring shift in how much better my life had become struck me with odd pangs of guilt knowing Allison was still far from recovering yet. The full weight of everything I had been through in the last few months left me stricken with a more or less permanent anxiety attack; pools of dread would collect in various parts of my body, tingling and stinging me, leaving me immobile for hours. My ex broke things off with me after a weird fight on my birthday in a ramen shop; it was absolutely the right thing for her to do. I spent two months trying to get ahold of Allison, messaging her, reaching out to any of her close friends I could think of, trying to settle up our payout from the security deposit, but also just trying to figure out if she was alive. It took until September to get a response from her, confirming that she was in fact coming back from the brink after all; dialysis and other interventions had nursed her back to health.

I started hanging out with my new roommates more, I got heavily involved in an organizing campaign for jail reform, I started making plans to shoot a short film with some friends, life was somehow getting much better. My grandmother died suddenly in November; it was a shock and it hurt losing her, but in a strange way it seemed right, it was the only way for such an abysmal year to end.

I can’t remember when, exactly, but Allison got back in touch in 2020. She was living in an apartment attached to her grandma’s house, working a steady job, making plans to go back to school to get her master’s. Somehow, her death had been averted. 2020 happened and it was obviously awful, but in comparison to how 2019 had gone, I think both of us found it relatively easy to deal with. Dealing with a private crisis always has a way of magnifying itself in isolation; carrying the weight of disaster alone hurts in a way that a global catastrophe doesn’t.

Of course, once your kidneys really fail there’s not much else you can do other than stay on dialysis forever. It’s hard to live a full life when you’re chained to those awful machines flushing the toxins out of your body for you, dealing with the bureaucracy of Medicaid. In passing, Allison mentioned she was on the kidney donor waiting list, and explained how futile it was to hope to win the lottery as a young person whose condition was relatively stable. Without much thought, I told her I was willing to get tested to see if I was a potential match. I’m type O negative, the universal donor, it seemed selfish not to give it a shot. After an unbelievably confusing series of tests, a heart attack-inducing bill from Labcorp sent in error, and some elaborate bicoastal phone tag, it appears I am a good match for Allison. In a couple weeks, I’ll be flying to Staten Island to do a final round of screening to make sure I’m a perfect candidate to donate a kidney, but it appears so far that I am. If everything looks good and I’m as healthy as I feel, I’ll be donating a kidney to her.

When I tell people this is what I’m planning to do, they’re slightly stunned and taken aback. It’s a strange feeling, because I don’t really want to be seen as a uniquely brave person for doing this. I firmly believe that if you find yourself in a position to alleviate another person’s suffering, you should do it. I won’t gain financially from this process, but the whole procedure will be paid for by an organization called the National Living Donor Assistance Center, so it’s not like I’ll lose anything either. I’ve been considerably more scared of surgery ever since David died, but at the end of the day, I’m really not concerned for my own wellbeing in the long term. Increasingly, it’s starting to feel as though this planet will not really be habitable within my lifetime, and as a result it’s difficult to care about the potential health complications that might arise from only having one kidney a few decades from now. Allison is trying to finish her master’s in social work so that she can work with homeless youth and be an advocate for them. If I can help her get healthy so she can dedicate herself to that work for the next couple of decades, that seems well worth the risks to me.

But on a deeper level, this feels like a golden opportunity to right wrongs. Allison shouldn’t have nearly died, the crushing weight of our for-profit healthcare system nearly killed her, like it kills tens of thousands of poor people every year (even when there isn’t a global pandemic), and it doesn’t have to be this way. To be able to help her recover, to help her thrive again, feels like an act of solidarity that will, in some small way, strike back against our cruel healthcare system and capitalism as a whole. This horrible experience we shared has an opportunity to be rectified by my own choices, and that is something life rarely hands you.

At this moment I am dreading taking multiple flights across the country to finish the surgery, vastly expanding my carbon footprint for yet another year as the climate crisis accelerates all around us. But as infrastructure collapses and wildfires rage, it feels incredible to be able to do something as an individual that I can point to that will materially make the world a better place. These last few years have painfully taught me how fleeting and fragile life is, and the cowardice of not acting to preserve a friend’s life is unacceptable to me. It is my firm belief that the next few decades are going to require all of us to take plunges of bravery and solidarity that feel unimaginable at the moment if we hope to maintain any semblance of human civilization, and I’m excited to do my small part now. Over the past year we’ve already seen people come together to care for each other in incredible ways; people in Portland fighting off tear gas together, mutual aid groups feeding the people our government abandoned, tenant activists blocking evictions, the enormity of how many other people have risen to the occasion already overwhelms me. I hope you’ll join me in caring for your friends in your own way, because at this point the only way out for all of us is through.