Have You Heard This One?

As someone who’s always tried to find the humor in serious situations, I can attest that even kidney donation can include some laugh-out-loud moments. I know I’m not alone, as I wrote last year in a blog post on hilarious questions and comments that fellow living donors on Facebook have heard. Example: “OMG, they didn’t wait till you died?!”

In my own experience as a donor (and mother of my recipient), moments that didn’t seem remotely funny at the time have since emerged as gems. Example: A young technician did an ultrasound to try to locate my adult son’s internal bleeding a week after his transplant. After the surgeon and radiologist came in and concluded that he needed exploratory emergency surgery, everyone headed out somberly. The tech sent them on their way with a perky “Have a nice day, y’all!”

Then there was the time, while my son was recuperating from the surgery at our house and I was being super careful to protect him from exposure to germs. I’d hidden my bouquet of flowers in our bathroom and thought everything was going great–till I discovered that he and our teenage daughter had unwittingly been sharing a toothbrush for a week.

If you have some real-life donation-related chuckles to share, please let me know!