BehindTheMedspeak: Black–Market Kidney

I read an article this morning in the new issue of VICE magazine that made me sit up and take notice.

I suggest that the reason it's not on the front page of the New York Times is because it's simply too hot to handle.

Or it's fiction.

Long story short: Toby Andrews, an American diagnosed with acute renal failure in 2003, learned that his chances of getting a kidney transplant and freeing himself from dialysis the conventional way — by getting on the UNOS waiting list — were essentially nil, what with the fact he was about 6,000th in line.

So, like approximately 3,500 or so other Americans who annually decide to take an alternative approach, he obtained a transplant on the black market.

The details are fascinating, whether or not you think Andrews did a terrible thing.

Before you unload on him, consider what you might do were you to find yourself in his situation.

Here's the story.

Black–Market Kidney

It cost $7,000 to buy the actual kidney, $1,000 to fly round-trip to Cape Town, South Africa, where the operation could be done legally, and $1,200 to fly the Brazilian bricklayer whose kidney is now inside me to Cape Town from São Paulo.

Oh, and $1,422 all told for my hotel and $732 for his.

I’m leaving out incidentals like food and cabs.

So… hold on, let me just pull up my little calculator widget here (have you checked out these widget things? They’re addictive as hell)… crunching these numbers here… so that’s $11,354 to save my life and spare my wife and daughter unbelievable misery.

Doesn’t seem like a lot to me.

I suffered acute renal failure in August of 2003.

I found out that the waiting list for a new kidney was about 3,000 people long.

Then I found out that the waiting list for a new kidney that matched my blood type was about 6,000 people long.

Dialysis would have kept me alive — barely — at the cost of being hooked up to a series of machines and tubes for the rest of my life.

I won’t even go into how much money either of these options was going to set me back.

So, like 3,500 other Americans this year, I dug around Google and finally came up with a Cape Town surgeon who specializes in transplanting kidneys into wealthy foreigners (he told me that most come from Mauritius).

At first he was put off that I didn’t have a relative lined up, but after a few more calls he gave me the number of a Brazilian man who runs what they call a "compensated gifting" service.

It took that guy maybe four minutes to call me back with the name of my donor.

Seriously.

My doctor here forwarded all my records to the hospital in South Africa, they did a crossmatch test on the Brazilian guy to make sure my body wouldn't shit out his kidney right after the op, and within five days I was on a plane heading down.

At the hospital they gave me an enema and a sedative then wheeled me up to the window of the OR so I could watch the doc pulling out my new kidney as I went under.

Now that the American Medicare system has flopped and nobody in Canada can help you out, it’s time to take the Hippocratic oath into our own hands.

So I went to South Africa, closed my eyes, and waited to be saved.

When I came to, I dry-heaved so hard that I passed out.

This, they said, was from coming off the anesthetic while starting the cyclosporine, the antirejection drug.

When I came back to, however, I felt like I’d woken up back in my body at age 20.

And all this for the cost of a Geo.

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There are already a number of comments on the VICE website; they appear below the article.

Is it true or is it realistic fiction?

I honestly don't know.

I've given anesthesia for removal of donor kidneys from people declared dead as well as for kidney transplants and there is nothing in the descriptions by Andrews — cursory as they are — that conflicts with reality.

Nor are the costs noted out–of–line with might be expected if his story is true.

So let's just say that even if it's not true, it could be.

I think that says it all.

And let me reiterate, though I know it won't lessen the inevitable flaming–to–come, that I don't advocate what Andrews did: I'm simply reporting what he wrote.

One other thing: since I began receiving VICE free a few years ago, I've found it to be consistently surprising, original and absorbing.

How is it possible for a magazine whose main business is clothes to put out a free product that's better than 99% of the magazines on the newstand?

One of the enduring mysteries of the universe and one it would behoove publishers of that 99% to look into before they join the burgeoning ranks of the defunct.