I’ve had an organ donor card in my wallet for as long as I can remember and I’ve always made it very clear to my loved ones that I want all my organs to be used when I die.
My question is, given that I only need one kidney, would it be better if I were to donate the other one right away rather than after my inevitable demise?
Obviously, my organs won’t be used in the unlikely event that I die in some unrecoverable way, like being lost at sea or something. And there’s always the possibility that a close relative might need a kidney at some point, so I should arguably save it for them.
Is there some other reason to do it now?
On the plus side, someone else gets to continue existing.
Or from the IT perspective: I have two important servers, one has a single drive, the other has RAID mirroring. The drive in the first server fails. I could take a drive out of the server with RAID and have two functional servers or I could keep the second one running on its RAID and have a server with redundancy (that hopefully/might not be needed).
(I’m not going out and donating a kidney though, guess we can say it’s because I’m selfish.)
But as OP points out, someone will get that kidney eventually anyway. So the difference is that a different someone else gets to continue existing.
OP erroneously thought that but it’s not actually correct. The conditions where someone dies but their kidney is viable for a transplant are rare.
Unless you’re running RAID 0 (stripe), then you’d lose everything by pulling one of the drives.
I don’t recommend using RAID 0 for kidneys.
Counterpoint: If you’re an IT guy, you’re probably making enough money that you can donate mosquito nets and save tons of lives, and it’s not worth risking all that to save one more.