CHGhee

Getting an organ from a living donor is a way to bypass ‘the list’ for deceased donor organs.

The process is different for living donors versus deceased. A living donor can choose to make a direct donation (that’s most common), a paired donation (like a trade if you aren’t compatible with the person you’d like to donate to), a simple non-directed/altruistic donation, or potentially a non-directed donation that starts off a chain of donations.

Non-directed donors recipients are chosen by a committee at the transplant center they decide to donate at.

Deceased donor organ are allocated per national policies though families of registered donors do have the option of pursing a directed donation if they can identify a viable recipient within an appropriate time frame. It’s is pretty rare for that to happen.

Go to r/transplant and read some of their stories about kidney donation from both recipients and donors. Everyone has their own limits, but I suspect the more you read, the less the thought of donating will scare you. Good luck.

As an American Paramedic, I assume you’re also providing a prehospital ECG, aspirin and potentially nitro or opioid analgesia for acute MIs. But you might be interested in looking at Remote Ischemic Conditioning. The last trial I saw was not promising but it’s still a neat idea to be familiar with

So the liver would regenerate again (and this has been seen in studies on animals) but you would not be eligible to donate again. My understanding from my surgeons’ explanation was that while the functional tissue of the liver regrows, the main blood vessels and bile ducts do not regenerate in a way that would make a repeat section useful for a recipient.

True but fortunately you really only need one and the most common causes of kidney failure destroy both kidneys simultaneously anyways.

That said, there is some risk with only having one kidney. Trauma to one flank would be much more concerning.