View other columns by Mark Kennedy
Imagine you are witness to a dying person whose kidneys have failed. Pretend the hospitalized patient is the mother of two young children. Maybe it's someone you know, maybe it's not.
Meanwhile, her two children - 10-year-old twins, a boy and a girl - are in the hospital's waiting area with their dad. Their eyes are vacant with fatigue and worry as end-stage renal failure slowly saps their mother's life.
Now, imagine that you have the power to step in and change the scenario. You can save the mom's life by donating one of your kidneys and still live happily ever after yourself.
Maybe you donate the kidney as an offering of thanks for the blessing of your own good health. Or maybe you've never done anything truly unselfish in your life, and you do it to boost your karma. In the process, you not only save a life, but you also save a whole family - maybe even yourself.
Granted, most organ donations don't play out like the fictional drama described above. But the results are often just as tangible.
I've often thought of organ-donation planning - as vitally important as it is - as being gratifying but low-risk. It's the rush you get by signing the donor release on the back of your driver's license. Or the arm's-length gratification that you receive from joining the crucial bone marrow registry for cancer patients, knowing that only one in 430 volunteers actually donate.
Meanwhile, if you are healthy and under 60 years old, chances are excellent that if you step up and offer to donate a kidney, you might be a good match for one of the 93,000 Americans on kidney-transplant waiting lists.
By donating one of your kidneys to the stranger, you can help a friend or family member on the waiting list. By virtue of your gift, they will immediately be moved up to "next-in-line" status. This is essentially a golden ticket that makes it virtually certain that your designee will quickly get a kidney.
Living donors are especially crucial for patients with renal failure. Tennessee Donor Services reports that about 2,900 people in its service area are on some sort of waiting list for a life-saving organ transplant. "Yet in 2015, only 301 Tennesseans donated one or more organs upon death," the donor advocacy group's website reports.
Forty-six-year-old Stephanie Merritt of Chattanooga is one of 93,000 Americans on waiting lists for a life-saving kidney transplant. The wait for a donated kidney can be up to five years unless you locate a friend, family member or stranger to donate a kidney specifically to you - or to a stranger on your behalf.
Merritt, a disabled former advertising and marketing professional with Type 1 diabetes, has been on dialysis for about five years. She's stable now but remains tethered to dialysis sessions two to three times a week. The sessions at a local clinic leave her exhausted.
"Imagine running a marathon every day," she said. "You don't feel like doing your daily duties, such as running errands and cleaning house."
After years of dialysis, Merritt has decided to expand the circle of people who know about her renal failure in hopes of improving her odds of finding a donor - either a direct match or someone who will donate to another person on her behalf. Matches are determined based on blood type, antibodies and the donor's age and general health.
"It's hard for me to ask someone [to be tested]," Merritt said. "It means not just being tested, but perhaps having surgery, and the possibility of complications down the road."
Still, the body has an amazing capacity to adapt to a single kidney, experts say, and the surgery and recovery for the donor have become less and less uncomfortable over time.
Since revealing her challenge to her church, White Oak United Methodist in Red Bank, four people have stepped forward in recent weeks to be tested on Merritt's behalf. Three have been rejected due to health issues, she said, but one person is still being evaluated.
About the process, Merritt said, "It's exciting. What do you say to somebody who wants to give you life?"
Merritt is on the waiting list for a donated kidney at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. To learn more, or to help Merritt or others on the Tennessee waiting list, visit: bit.ly/2iwShKW.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.