FEATURE
Donating a Second Chance
Ohio University sophomore (and Backdropper) Maya Meade shares her journey on what it’s like to be a living kidney donor. BY SOPHIA ENGLEHART | ILLUSTRATION BY ABIGAIL SUMMERS
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aya Meade, a sophomore studying journalism and minoring in political science at Ohio University, is an organ donor. For Meade, it is more than a heart icon stamped on her driver’s license. Meade is a living donor, which means that she is choosing to donate one of her kidneys to almost a complete stranger while she is still living. “I don’t know him personally, the person that’s getting the kidney. I have never met him,” Meade says. This all started when Meade was babysitting for a woman who was trying to get a kidney donation for her father. “She found out that she was not approved to do the surgery,” Meade says. “And I was like, ‘Well, I know that you mentioned that your blood type was A negative; mine is, too. And since you couldn’t do this donation, I’ll at least go through the testing to see if I can do it.’” With that, Meade started the process of becoming a living organ donor and is scheduled to donate her kidney in May. “[It was] really spur of the moment,” Meade says. “When I offered it to her, I hadn’t really thought it through, but I just had the idea and I said it to her and I was like, ‘It could happen.’” According to the Donate Life Ohio website, living organ donation is a process when an individual voluntarily decides to donate an organ of choice to another person. That type of donation differs from a normal donation process, which usually occurs when a registered organ donor dies and their organs are utilized for living patients in need of a transplant. “For people to get a living donor, the benefits [are that it] generally decreases your time on waiting for
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an organ because ... you can wait three to five years on the deceased donor list,” says Dana Mason, a former transplant social worker and the Independent Living Donor Advocate at Ohio State University. Mason says another benefit of a living donor is that they can undergo more tests and thus give more information about themselves. Mason works with donors to help them throughout the process of finding a recipient. Living Donor is a program directly affiliated with Ohio State University hospitals and consists of both a Living Kidney and Living Liver Donor program. The first step in the process of living organ donation is having matching blood types. Before the actual donation, living organ donors have to complete a series of qualifications, including a urine test, antibody screening, a psychological evaluation and other medical tests. At OSU, donors also have to be approved by a patient selection committee, which is when members of every medical department evaluate if the transplant should go through or if the organ should be donated to another person on the waiting list. This was the case for Meade, who is undergoing what she described as “a domino effect,” or what doctors call a kidney paired donation (KPD). Instead of directly donating to the original recipient, Meade’s kidney will be going to another, younger donor in need. Then that individual’s original donor will be giving their kidney to Meade’s original recipient. Due to her age compared to her recipient, Meade’s kidney has a longer life span and will benefit a younger patient in need of the kidney more than the original, older recipient.
