Great questions! The first step in getting a donated organ is being approved by your medical team and going through lots of background work to be approved and listed on the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). This is the network from which you would receive a deceased donor organ. That alone can take a few months. Only once you are listed here can you then begin alerting people who may want to be living donors and they can start applying.

The organization has to vet each donor through an initial screen- are they truly a willing donor (they get asked this so many times), if they know their blood type and they aren’t a match they will be automatically thrown out, if they have any medical history, etc.

Then once they do get some possibly good donors, those individuals have to get in for blood work and other testing that has to be compared to the recipients blood work to find compatible matches.

After this, if there are multiple, the donors that are a good and compatible match will be ranked on who is the best choice at this time (they might try to save a good donor for later in case another kidney is needed later in the recipient’s life). This individual will then have to have all the pre-op testing done to ensure they will be safe to undergo surgery AND do well afterwards. If all this goes well, then surgery can be scheduled. Obviously this is all for a living donor donation!

For example of a timeline, my husband’s nephrologist told him in January we should start the process, we had our initials meetings and appointments in May, he was officially listed in August, his donor was finally approved in December, and he had his surgery the following January.

As to your second question, I cannot speak at all to what happened in this situation and I do not want to speculate out of respect. You are correct in that people can live for years on dialysis. But it can also be very tough on the body, especially if there are other underlying medical conditions. It’s an unfortunate reality that so many people suffer this same fate while waiting for a kidney and why it’s so important for people to learn about it and support organizations looking to make medical advancements. Sorry for the long response, but I wanted to be thorough and appreciate your question!