A kidney donor at 18 now regrets it
I admire the author&#x27;s selflessness. At the same time, it seemed easier to be selfless as a teenager, probably for similar reasons for why it&#x27;s easier to draft 18-year-olds than it is 28-year-olds. Given young persons willingness to sacrifice for the greater cause without realizing that life extends well past your 30s and 40s, I wonder if more shouldn&#x27;t be done to let young donors think of the risks, so that their naïveté isn&#x27;t something that the system takes advantage of.<p>The author&#x27;s right to ask for better data and tracking of donors. That said, his current worries are likely to be heavily informed by selection bias:<p>&gt; <i>Five years after the surgery, when I was 23 and getting ready to go to medical school, I began working in a research lab that was looking at kidney donors who had gone on to develop kidney failure. For that research, I talked to more than 100 such donors. In some cases, the remaining kidneys failed; in others, the organ became injured or developed cancer. The more I learned, the more nervous I became about the logic of my decision at age 18 to donate.</i><p>If you spend a lot of time talking only to donors where things have gone wrong, yeah, you&#x27;ll be paranoid. Reminds me of being a cops reporter in which you strongly associate certain neighborhoods with shootings and murders because, professionally, those incidents are the only times you ever visit those neighborhoods.