Diary of a Kidney Donor: Thanksgiving

A life-giving gift is worth celebrating

This is the fifth and last of this series of articles in this series; the first part starts here. Sebastopol psychotherapist Cynthia McReynolds shared with us messages that she sent to close friends, family and clients about her decision to become a kidney donor. Cynthia, 74, donated her kidney to Wee Simla, 59, who has been on kidney dialysis for five years. She updated people as she went through a series of tests in August to confirm that she was a compatible donor. Then, in October, she went to UCDavis hospital in Sacramento to have one of her kidneys removed and then transplanted hours later into Wee Simla. She was back home in Sebastopol soon after, followed a few days later by Wee.

We hear from Cynthia in her own words.

Thanksgiving, November 28, 2024

Coda. Final thoughts about donating a kidney.

The four of us (Wee and I, and our two benevolent partners) enjoyed Thanksgiving at the home of mutual friends. All four of us are still glowing with amazement at the profound threshold that we crossed just two weeks and two days ago. Today, I’m feeling great, active, and healthy, and Wee is thriving, working as usual in his garden and greenhouse. Right after surgery, Wee was on an intense regimen of anti-rejection medications which had heavy side effects. As UCDavis monitored him closely (blood draws several times each week and a weekly in-person visit back in Sacramento), those medications got scaled back quite rapidly. The transplant is working very well. Our kidney landed in its new home and got right to work without a hitch!

When I step back from this experience, I see that essentially, I took two weeks off work (and enjoyed resting, reading books, receiving bouquets, and getting gifts of food), and Wee got a a chance at a longer life of freedom and health. I can’t see any way to look at this except as an ENORMOUS win, all the way around.

However, I hear from lots of people that it seems unthinkably weird to give part of one’s body to someone else. But consider a few things. Up until World War II, blood donations were strange and “not normal.” Give my blood to someone? Eck! But donating blood isn’t weird anymore. Now, a lot of us make blood donations because our bodies can make plenty more and giving blood doesn’t hurt our health. Why do we do it? Because we want to help other people whether we know them or not.

Blood donation has become commonplace, but organ donation hasn’t. Yet. After my experience, here’s how I am thinking about it. To a lay person like me, a surgeon using a robot inside my body to remove a redundant organ is certainly an unfamiliar, even weird concept. And I did feel physically taxed for a few days after surgery and anesthesia. However, with a little bit of time, my natural healing capacities did their magic, and I already feel fine and back to my usual life. This makes me think about other things that were once unimaginable – like hurtling across the sky at 550 mph in a metal tube with a bunch of strangers. Yet for most of us, airplane flights don’t seem unnatural. They seem normal. If we give air travel any thought at all, we usually regard it as amazingly helpful technology. That’s similar to how donating my extra kidney feels to me now. Normal. And amazingly helpful.

As the four of us were laughing and joking at Thanksgiving dinner, my husband praised me for being “generous with my giblets.” Amen! By giving a kidney to Wee I got the privilege of fulfilling those inspiring words I saw outside the Living Donor Center on my first visit to UCDavis :

“I am a donor to someone in need.
Where their life was locked,
I offered a key."

You can almost see it in the Thanksgiving Day photograph below. Medical expertise took something I actually didn’t need from the left side of my body and nestled it into the right side of Wee’s body. With that, I got a vacation and Wee got freedom from dialysis.