It all happened so quickly. We had just been visiting my mom and stepfather, Gary, in mid-April, and then a week later, we learned that my stepfather (also my kidney recipient) had stage-4 squamous cell skin cancer that had made its way throughout his body, to his lungs, lymph nodes, and other parts of his abdomen. We knew during our visit that he had a strange growth on his neck and was feeling weaker than usual. But we didn’t know how bad it was. He had had many small skin cancer growths removed over the years, which were caused by the anti-rejection drugs he was taking as an organ recipien ..read more

Dec. 9, 2021, was the 10th anniversary of my kidney donation. Worth Noting According to this article from Ohio State University, the kidney I donated to my stepdad is likely to last 10-13 years, while a kidney from a deceased donor would have survived 7-9 years. So, it’s worth noting that as of this past December, it has been 10 years since my donation. I should have made a bigger deal out of that and posted something on this blog sooner. I’m not sure why I didn’t. I guess I haven’t felt inspired to write anything for a while for some reason. But even though I don’t have anything super clever ..read more

One, two, three, four… I wonder how many more… A friend of ours used to joke that he thought trailer parks actually cause tornadoes… You know, because whenever you’d hear about a tornado touching down, it seemed like a trailer park was always part of the destruction. Lately, I’ve started to wonder if a similar type of ridiculous causality is surrounding me. More and more people in my circle keep turning out to be what I call “ooksters,” or people with only one (functioning) kidney. You already know about me and my stepdad. He’s the reason I started this OOK blog. Both of his kidneys failed, so ..read more

When I donated a kidney to my stepfather almost 10 years ago, I was, well, almost 10 years younger. At that time, even though I wasn’t super young, I was younger-enough than my stepfather — that my kidney seemed like a nice, shall we say, upgrade for him. Some people who get donated kidneys end up needing more than one over the course of their lives… And, so far, knock on wood, my kidney still seems to be supporting my stepfather pretty well. I’m very grateful for that. But, when you’re a person who would be willing to donate an organ, and you find out, as I have, that another person in you ..read more