Parasites
I’m surprised that it took this long. I’ve had the website up for a while now, and I just appeared in Glen Gower’s newsletter. He’s our local city councillor, and was kind enough to give me a few minutes of his time recently.
But not everyone is quite so altruistic. I just received an email from a “woman” (who knows?) asking if I am looking for a kidney, when obviously I am. I pointed her at the Ottawa Hospital living donor program, and then did a quick search on her email address out of curiosity.
I found a post on the Kidney Subreddit that had been deleted but the search engine still had a cached copy of it. She was offering the same to anyone on the subreddit, for a price. That is illegal in the U.S., but apparently the laws in Canada are somewhat vague as of 2008. I’m not sure about today, but such laws tend to move slowly.
To be clear, if you want to use the living donor transplant program, giving an organ cannot be transactional in any way. If you give, you are giving because you want to help, and you expect nothing in return. If you are one of these parasites, looking to prey on people when they are at their weakest, then for your sake, I hope you never need the same, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
If you are not planning to leave the world better than you found it, then you and I are likely not going to get along.