The Gift of Life
He could have died. He would have died. It was that simple, yet at the same time
it was terribly complicated. At age 17, he wouldn’t have been able to go to college at
New York University like he had always dreamed of doing. He wouldn’t have been able
to travel to Dubai and see the world and all of the different people he had once dreamed
of seeing. He wouldn’t have been able to move to Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his wife
and three children and retire in Orlando after the birth of his first grandchild. He would
have had the gift of life taken from him in a moment’s notice, but it wasn’t the will of
God that day. God decided to give him my kidney; of all the kidneys in the world, God
saw fit to bless young Christopher with mine.
You might say, “Oh, what a selfless person you are! Your heart is made of gold!”
In fact, at the time, I was the exact opposite. I was a selfish and ignorant person. I sat
through health class after health class, year after year, when I was in grade school and
learned about the lives that could be changed through organ donation. It was all well and
good, but I just didn’t want to give up my kidney.
I was too stupid not to realize how important the kidney was to the body and how
vital this special organ was to maintain physiological health. The kidney, in a sense, is a
powerful factory that performs functions like regulating blood pressure, balancing body
fluids, cleaning waste from the body via blood, producing active amounts of vitamin D
for healthy bones, as well as regulating red blood cell counts (National Kidney
Foundation 1). Without healthy kidneys humans have a very slim chance of survival if
any at all. Kidneys are a bare necessity for humans; without them we are as good as
dead.
2
I knew all of this. I just didn’t want to give up a kidney that I thought no one
would use. It was a kidney that I thought I needed more than anyone suffering from
CKD, or Chronic Kidney Disease, and I...