by SLAVENKA DRAKULIC
“Thousands of Europeans die annually waiting for a new kidney, heart or liver. At the same time, the black-market trade in organs is thriving, as a recent scandal in Germany has shown. So should organ trading be legalized? Slavenka Drakulic, herself a two-time kidney transplant patient, argues the pros and cons.”
That morning, a telephone call cut my life in half – into a life before the kidney transplant and a life after it. It was 16 February 1986, a cold and stormy day, when the call from Boston’s New England Deaconess Hospital came through. I was 37 years old, divorced, with a teenage daughter. I was living in Yugoslavia and after six years of surviving on a haemodialysis machine, connected to it for four hours every second day, I had been wondering if there would ever be a transplant.
Eighteen years later, in 2004, I got another call, this time from Rhode Island Hospital. After the rejection of the first kidney and another four years of waiting on machines – another chance! And a very special one at that: this time I was to receive a kidney from an altruistic, non-related, living donor.
I was shocked when I heard that. An unknown person who gives away her kidney to a stranger! How is that possible? Later, after the surgery, I met my donor Christine Swenson, a young nurse and mother of two. I asked her what her motivation was. Christine replied that she had no particular reason except the wish to help. People tend to assume almost automatically that such an act of extreme goodness must be motivated by money – or religious beliefs. Neither applied in Christine’s case. Having written a book about people like Christine, I know that they are ordinary people and that is precisely why their gifts are so precious.
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