By Bill Peckham
Virginia Postrel has written an article in the Atlantic touting the need for an organ market: With Functioning Kidneys for All.... I found her arguments unconvincing to the extreme and I attribute their weakness to her distorted and minimalist understanding of kidney disease and renal replacement. She is the proverbial blind woman describing the elephant by grasping only its tail.
I'll address the many flaws in Postrel's reasoning in a future post (or I can simply reprint DSENs previous posts on the misguided notion that what we need is an organ market).
What needs to be said first. What needs to be said now and what set my teeth on edge and clouds steaming from my ears was her caviler use of Bill "Epoman" Halcomb's words and the deceitful decision to select 14 words out of a massive body of Bill's writings:
“Yes, it keeps us alive, but this is not what living should be like,” wrote Bill “Epoman” Halcomb, the founder of the patient community at IHateDialysis.com. (Halcomb died in March 2007, after 13 years on dialysis. He was 34.)
Damn you. Damn you for pulling that quote and using Bill's demise to advance your uninformed opinion.
Read Peter's tribute honoring Bill. Bill made an amazing journey. The journey from I Hate Dialysis to I Love NxStage (archive link) in public. His travelogues of that journey are on the internet for all to read.
You can follow that journey on the Home Dialysis Central's forum from Bill's first posts to his later posts as well as his many more recent post on IHD. At very least read Bill's home more frequent dialysis training diary.
In the end Bill understood the myth of the high dialysis mortality rate and Bill understood, what I and so many others understand: dialysis can make you feel well and it can allow you to live a normal life. The only requirement is that you get enough.
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