I regret donating a kidney to my mom
Three years ago, my [36F] mom [69F] was diagnosed with kidney failure, most likely due to high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes which was poorly controlled for years because she doesn't like doctors and didn't want to be a "pill-popper." She was told she had to go on dialysis three days a week (up to 6 hours a day including travel time) while she was put on the kidney transplant waiting list, which takes years to find a match on average. She was firm that she did not want to be on dialysis, and told me to give her one of my kidneys. She said she had raised me and provided for me all these years, put me through college etc., now she needed this from me. Filial piety is very important to our culture (we are Chinese-American). I was taken aback by this, but after thinking about it, I also thought it was the right thing to do based on my own values: I love my mom, I care about helping people, I was already signed up to be a deceased organ donor, plenty of people live with only one kidney so if I can give a kidney to save someone else's life then I should, especially if it is a loved one, etc.
They make being a kidney donor sound very good in theory--people with only one kidney can live just as long as people with two, and if you ever need a kidney you get priority on the transplant list. What they leave out is you have to basically turn your life upside down after because you now only have half the reserve. I had been completely healthy before but only a year after the surgery they found that my remaining kidney couldn't handle doing the work of two and was now also in the early stages of failing. I had built my life around food, I was working my dream job as a chef and ran a food-travel blog as my main hobby. However to protect my remaining kidney I basically had to cut out meat, fat and sugar from my diet, and limit salt to just 1 gram a day which meant I had to quit my dream job as a huge part of it was tasting the food I was serving. I don't have any other skills so the only job I was able to get was as a secretary. Almost all of the food I can still eat is very bland and when I do travel I often have to bring my own food or survive on salads. (And please don't lecture me about "healthy restaurants"--I went to culinary school, I can tell you that restaurant food is by definition not "healthy"; even at vegan/self-billed "healthy" restaurants they still use high quantities of salt, sugar, fat and umami to appeal to the primitive part of our brain that determines whether food tastes good or not).
Meanwhile, only about two years after to transplant, the kidney I gave to my mom also failed. She would often not be taking the immunosuppressants for after the transplant because she could not tolerate the side effects, it's possible her hypertension or diabetes were still not optimally controlled, and she also did not make any of the dietary changes. She is now back on dialysis and the waiting list.
I'll probably get flak for this but looking back I cannot help but think it was not worth it. I bought my mom maybe two extra years at the cost of thirty years of my life or more that would have been free from worries about chronic health problems. I also lost my career, my main hobby, and my husband and I had been thinking about starting a family but my doctor told me it would not be advisable for me to have children. I was previously healthy but am now on several medications to try to stretch my remaining kidney as far as possible before I have to go on dialysis. And even if I do get a kidney transplant, I will have to take strong immunosuppressants with significant side effects for the rest of my life (unlike the benign blood pressure and sugar meds my mom could have just taken like she was supposed to to not be in this position in the first place). My mom lived a full life, almost 70 years, and to try to buy her a few more years I feel like I cut mine in half
EDIT: Wow was not expecting this level of support and positivity, it really means a lot to me! To address a few points that a few people have asked me about: Yes, I am talking to a therapist, a big question that we are working through is, was my decision to donate really my own based on my values, or was I influenced into it by my mom and norms of how I should behave towards her. At the time I thought I was weighing the two separately but my therapist has helped me identify ways her values might have been speaking through me unconsciously (best case), or ways she could have been deliberately trying to manipulate me (worst case)--I'll keep you posted.
Something that therapy has also helped me to crystallize: a core value that a lot of my beliefs stem from is that a year of life for me is not special or worth more than a year for anybody else, and vice versa. But just looking at it objectively, my mom does not have many years left regardless of whether she got a kidney, while I still had a lot of years to potentially lose by giving one away. So even just based on that, forget anything about rare complications or transplant rejection, if I had had this mindset then I probably would have said no.
As for my current job--it's true secretarial work isn't what I find stimulating, when it became apparent that I would have to switch careers I considered going back to school to do something with technical and leadership potential like I had in the kitchen, maybe engineering, or even as a long shot go to medical school. But I had to suppress those notions as the reality was I could not afford to take risks like go hundreds of thousands of $ into debt for 4-8 years, I needed a job that I was qualified for now and that would provide health insurance for my kidney condition, that I wouldn't lose because I could no longer do the job if I got sicker. There aren't that many jobs that offer that anymore so I consider myself lucky I even found this
