It's the Most Wonderful Gift of the Year

It happens every year about this time. Like presents.

Sometimes it's an average Joe or Joanne, unknown to everyone except family and friends, who strolls into a hospital, walks up to the information desk and declares they want to donate one of their kidneys.

They don't necessarily care who it goes to. They just saw a story on the news, or know somebody with renal failure, or just became overpowered with the Christmas spirit. They want to make a difference in someone's life, to enhance the quality of somebody else's time on this planet. It's called "living non-directed donation."

This year it happened in (among other places, we pray) Illinois. According to the National Kidney Foundation of Illinois website, an anonymous donor stepped forward this month whose blood and tissue types were compatible with a 16-year-old teenager named Jonathan Guitron. And shortly thereafter, the Guitrons received the gift every family struggling with kidney failure longs to receive:

The Call.

"We were definitely not expecting to get it," says his mother Nicki, referring to the call from the hospital or transplant center announcing that a matching organ has been located. "But we're beyond grateful."

So this year on Christmas Day, instead of spending the day combining their joy with undercurrents of concern and fear for Jonathan's health, the Guitron family will be at the hospital helping him get prepped for surgery. If all goes according to plan, he and his donor will undergo simultaneous surgeries the morning of Dec. 26th, proving the adage that it's more blessed to give than to receive.

The donor will give, and Jonathan will be more than delighted to receive.

I can say from personal experience that recovery from transplant surgery is slow and excruciatingly painful, and there are some medications you will take every day for the rest of your life. But when the healing is complete, life is infinitely better than anything one can imagine while on dialysis.

Now, not everyone reading this may be willing or able to rush to the nearest hospital tomorrow and scream, "Take my kidney! Please!" That's a tremendous decision. But here's something you could do:

Sometime today, after all the presents have been opened and cooed over and your closest family members are gathered 'round, take a few minutes to talk about organ donation. Let them know you wish to be a donor after you've passed so there can be no mistaking your wishes, and ask if they've thought about what their intentions are.

And check your driver's license. Many states have some sort of symbol on their licenses indicating the driver wishes to be a donor. In Illinois, where I live, it's a small red outline of the state. In other states it can be a heart, a star, or even simply the words "Organ Donor." I've found that many people are organ donors and either forgot or didn't realize they had made the commitment.

Please, make this the merriest, jolliest, happiest Christmas ever. I can bet the Guitrons will.

Merry Kidneymas.

Well, If This New Development Don't Trump All

Illustration by Global Village Space

As if you needed any more proof during this holiday season that miracles can happen: I am about to say something complimentary about our President of these United States, Donald John Trump.

I can hardly believe it either. And on his Impeachment Week, at that. Will wonders never cease?

Then again, none of us is completely good or totally evil. Hitler built the Autobahn, and I understand he threw amazing parties.

You have to give the devil his due. So I must praise Twitler and his administration for putting some muscle this week behind a cause that is extremely dear to my heart: kidneys and increasing the number of available organs for the nearly 100,000 Americans waiting for a transplant.

In July, Trump signed an executive order –– the first executive order focused on kidney health since the 1970s –– launching an initiative aimed at improving the lives of Americans suffering with kidney disease. Among other things, the initiative seeks to help prevent renal failure in the first place through improved diagnosis, treatment and preventative care.

The federal action also seeks to streamline and speed up the process of kidney matching and modernize the existing system in order to increase the number of transplants. It wants to make treatment options more affordable and ramp up the development and placement of artificial kidneys.

Wow.

Then on Dec. 17, the Trump administration announced a radical new change to the kidney donation system that could result in as many as 5,000 more available organs every year.

To help make the system more transparent, the government wants to change the way it works with organ procurement organizations (OPOs), the federally-funded nonprofits Medicare and other agencies rely on to manage the process of obtaining kidneys.

In the past, OPOs have been largely autonomous and infrequently re-certified. Partly as a result of this, as you may have heard elsewhere, almost 20 percent of kidneys currently donated in the U.S. are routinely discarded. That's one out of every five!

They may have come from older donors or persons with pre-existing health conditions, but if you're on dialysis, stuck on a transplant waitlist, and feeling weaker every day, an imperfect kidney is way better than no kidney at all.

With ongoing advancements in medicine, many of these "imperfect" kidneys could work quite well. (By contrast, France only throws out about 9 percent of kidneys donated.) The new system would rely on independent data by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) that would be used to evaluate the OPOs in terms of their donation rates and the percentage of donors whose organs are actually transplanted.

In addition, Trumpster wants to make it easier for living donors to help save lives by giving one of their kidneys to another. Hospital expenses for donors have long been covered completely, but new rules also would reimburse donors for lost wages and, possibly, child and eldercare as well.

For a man who cheats on his wives, denies responsibility for everything but the economy, brags about everything but his tax returns, attempts to extort foreign leaders, and travels to Michigan to suggest that its longest-serving congressman in U. S. history may now be in Hell, this is an unusually compassionate act from Le Grand Orange.

Somebody must have told him to do it.

Regardless of the reason, however, for the 3,000 people who are added to the transplant waiting list each month and the 20 people who die every day waiting for their matching organ to be found, any step forward is a quantum leap.

And of course, Don the Con can't even do a good thing without opening his mouth and cramming his bone spurs in it. In signing the executive order last summer, he was heard by everyone within earshot rhapsodizing that 'The kidney has a special place in the heart. It's an incredible thing."

This, of course, sparked an avalanche of social media wisecrackers offering Agent Orange free anatomy advice. And for all we know, he may need it.

T-Rump often seems to have trouble finding his backside with both hands.