I phoned someone at the transplant office today about scheduling. I explained my schedule in the spring, and they assured me that a late January, early February date should work no problem. They will make sure to slot me in on a day that the doctor I want has surgery time. They were very accommodating, “Whatever will fit your schedule…” She assured me that it will be no problem to schedule all the remaining tests I need in January.
So I guess I can start telling more people about this now. I also decided to post these entries on-line. I set up a blog on Blogger, and called it “An undesignated donor”. When I started looking into this, I tried to search for blogs of people, and I did find some accounts of people who donated to someone they know. But I felt the story was often very brief, and didn’t get into all the feelings or experiences they went through. So I hope this blog can be a more complete outline of what it is like to donate; specifically for those who donate to someone they don’t know.
I also realized as I set up this blog that people might be reading this from the United States or other countries. FYI, in Canada we have universal health insurance, which is paid for by our taxes. The Ontario Health Insurance Program (OHIP) covers almost all of our medical expenses. In terms of being a kidney donor, I’ve had all these tests and I have not paid for one thing, it is all covered by our government health plan.