{"id":543,"date":"2020-12-28T18:03:35","date_gmt":"2020-12-28T23:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/?p=543"},"modified":"2021-05-17T19:50:43","modified_gmt":"2021-05-17T23:50:43","slug":"reboot-3-one-kidney-marathon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/2020\/12\/reboot-3-one-kidney-marathon\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog reboot #3 &#8211; one-kidney marathon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I (Hilary Caws-Elwitt, Northampton MA) donated a kidney to a stranger on December 9th, 2020, one year and one day after I filled out the first interest form at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kidneyregistry.org\/info\/considering-kidney-donation\">National Kidney Registry<\/a> and many years after I started thinking about it as something I might do. I was inspired by the many donors who have gone before, who almost universally say it&#8217;s one of the best things they&#8217;ve ever done. At not quite 3 weeks post-surgery I am feeling almost 100% and have started running again, and I agree with all those other donors that I would do it again in a heartbeat if I could. But instead I can be an advocate. <a href=\"https:\/\/kidneydonorathlete.org\/\">Kidney Donor Athletes<\/a> became one of my go-to sites during the long journey to donation and made it clear that donors can do whatever they want physically including marathons and ultras; I&#8217;m planning another marathon, ideally in fall 2021, which will be my fourth overall but my first with one kidney. I&#8217;m rebooting this blog to document that next marathon, but more specifically to encourage recreational marathoners to consider kidney donation. I think it&#8217;s a natural fit for many reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Marathoners are well-suited to donation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>We tend to be healthy, so are more likely to be approved as donors<\/li><li>Just like running a marathon, donating a kidney is something that most regular people consider a little crazy or even &#8220;impossible&#8221; and we&#8217;ve dealt with those reactions<\/li><li>We usually have learned to really listen to our bodies<\/li><li>We have the experience of a long-drawn-out planning and preparing process<\/li><li>We&#8217;ve built physical and mental stamina<\/li><li>We can deal with physical discomfort<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Motivations to run and to donate can be similar:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>If one of the reasons you chose to run a marathon was to challenge yourself, to see what you could handle, to tackle a huge project and a huge adventure&#8230; you might find that kidney donation scratches those same itches.<\/li><li>If you love the camaraderie, community, and feeling of belonging to a tribe of runners, you&#8217;ll find something similar in the tight-knit and supportive donor community.<\/li><li>If you wanted to savor the feeling of &#8220;I am a marathoner,&#8221; the identity that nothing can take away &#8211; becoming a kidney donor is like that in spades.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And best of all, it directly helps another human being in a way that very few people have the opportunity to do. The <a href=\"https:\/\/optn.transplant.hrsa.gov\/data\/\">US kidney waitlist<\/a> is over 90,000. There are not enough deceased donor kidneys to meet the need, and living kidneys have better outcomes anyway. Thousands of people die every year waiting for a kidney.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Every single one of [the kidney donors] was so proud of what they did. They all felt,&nbsp;<em>Here is something grand that I did. Here is something unambiguously good, and I can be proud of this for the rest of my life, and whatever else I do and however else I fail as a person, this is something that no one can take away from me.<\/em>&nbsp;And that\u2019s a big thing in a person\u2019s life. And there aren\u2019t that many chances to do something like that. &#8212;Larissa McFarquar, <a href=\"https:\/\/slate.com\/human-interest\/2020\/01\/donate-kidney-family-decision-altruism.html\">interviewed<\/a> by Charles Duhigg<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I wrote up most of the kidney donation journey on a private forum, since I didn&#8217;t want to go public until I was successfully through the process. I&#8217;ve adapted and reposted, backdated to when the events actually happened &#8211; from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/?p=557\">just before talking to my doctor<\/a> to the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/?p=619\">first follow-up after surgery<\/a> , and I&#8217;ll continue with training for the marathon (hoping for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hartfordmarathon.com\/\">Hartford<\/a>). It&#8217;s super-detailed because that&#8217;s what I would have wanted to read as a prospective donor (and I tend to be wordy&#8230;) Feel free to <a href=\"mailto:hcethatsme@gmail.com?subject=Kidney donation blog\">contact me<\/a> with any questions or leave a comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I (Hilary Caws-Elwitt, Northampton MA) donated a kidney to a stranger on December 9th, 2020, one year and one day after I filled out the first interest form at the National Kidney Registry and many years after I started thinking about it as something I might do. I was inspired by the many donors who [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kidney-donation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":653,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions\/653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}