Ego Puts Patient Lives in Danger

When I was in France, I received an email from Janet, my neighbor who is my unmatched donor. She said that she had spoken with her coordinator at UCLA, who claimed she knew nothing about the paired donation we had arranged with Bob and Maria. I emailed Bob. What's up? I wondered. He wrote back that Maria had been told the same thing by the coordinator--that she knew nothing about our arrangement, nothing about Heidi and Janet. Under further questioning, however, she said that it was her job to arrange donations, not the patient's job and that we should have let her make the arrangements.

Can you believe that! Instead of saying, "Oh, how beautiful that you four found each other! That makes my job easier," she was prepared to thwart the arrangement because her ego had been bruised. It's like c'mon, lady, people's lives are at stake!

Once again, if the four of us were not on top of this, we could have been placed on the bottom of everyone's to-do list. It's amazing, with all that patients have to put up with, with the physical, emotional, and social challenges of being on dialysis, that we also have to deal with difficult health professionals who supposedly are being paid to help us.