Why I donated a kidney to a stranger

One year ago I walked into an operating theatre, dressed in a tiny surgical nightie. Over the next three hours, through various keyhole incisions in my belly, my left kidney was cut from its pillow of protective suet and extracted from below the belt line. The kidney was rinsed through, put on ice and boxed up. It was then zoomed by car from my Bristol hospital to Birmingham, where a surgical team was waiting with a prepped male patient. Over the next few hours, the kidney was plumbed into the groin of a man whose name I still don’t know. He was in his forties and extremely ill.

That evening I was told by my transplant nurse that my kidney had begun its new life. Information about my recipient was scant but I was told that he had had a transplant before (I found that curiously upsetting news, as I had wrongly assumed that he must be a no–hoper) and was fiendishly hard to match.