We want to put together an homage to The Gift of the Magi, wherein each of us sells a possession in order to buy a gift for the other- but, like in the classic tale- we both have sold something upon which is dependent the gift we are unknowingly about to receive.
(convoluted, I’m afraid if you don’t know the story you will have to actually read the link before you can understand this Thread)
I thought a kidney would be a funny thing to sell, so then the seller of the kidney has to receive a gift that requires that the recipient has two kidneys.
I had it in my mind that people with only a single kidney are strictly advised to drink alcohol in moderation- if at all. So, I thought it would be funny for the seller of the kidney to receive a nice bottle of hard liquor as a gift.
Much to my dismay, as I researched my assumption I found that people with a single kidney can drink just as they did when they had two kidneys.
Despite exhaustive research, I have found nothing that a single-kidneyed person can’t do- thus no possibility for a funny gift for the seller of the kidney.
Is there anything Dopers know of that would be dangerous/ill-advised for a person with only one kidney?
Pancreas can be done without, as long as the person takes insulin and digestive enzymes.
Gall bladder is not necessary, nor is the appendix.
Testes, ovaries, uterus, prostate all can be done away with.
Large intestine isn’t really needed, one will need to use an ileostomy with bag and modify their activities accordingly.
Stomach can be removed, and people still get by.
A lot of the small bowel can be removed, but most folks will need to have a little left behind to live. Trying to survive on hyperalimentation (food via central IV line) is not real pleasant, but one can last for years in some cases.
Adrenals can be removed, and replacement hormones given, but it ain’t pretty, and eventually most people prefer death.
Thyroid can be removed, and folks will get by with replacement hormones. Same for the parathyroids.
As for the OP, other than donating a kidney, people with one normally functioning kidney don’t need to restrict their activities in the vast majority of cases.
Honestly, though, I doubt a reputable hospital is going to do too many, or any, amputations from living people if the result would be a severely reduced quality of life for the donor.
For the purposes of the sketch, it doesn’t have to be a reputable hospital- especially since the organ’s been sold, not donated.
I went through Qadgop’s list and damn it if people don’t live perfectly normal lives without all those things! Derleth, your donated eye/3-D idea is good. Though, as it will appear onstage she will have two eyes so she’ll have to explain that one of them is glass.
Having bought a glass eye, she’ll have spent some of the profit from the sold eye- the income from which was meant to buy a present for me. Hmmmm, presumably a glass eye would only cost a fraction of what she got from her real eye, so she could have bought a glass eye with money left over.
Hmmmm.
My misconception was influenced by some vaguely remembered comedy T.V. show or movie.
There were two brothers, minor characters not part of the main plot, they were a bit past middle-aged. One brother had donated a kidney to save the other. The recipient of the kidney was an alcoholic. The brother who donated the kidney would get angry whenever the alcoholic brother would drink, shouting “That’s MY kidney!”.
I think this is the origin of my idea that alcoholism is major punishment on the kidneys.
There was also something in the Farrelly Brothers movie Stuck on You- the movie about the conjoined twin brothers. This scene I only have a VERY vague memory of:
One brother, trying to force agreement from the other brother on a particular issue, threatened to keep drinking until his brother would agree (to whatever it was he was trying to get agreement on). The threat was something along the lines of- because of who had what functioning organs, the brother not drinking would be the one to feel the punishment from the drinking.
So, if the misconception that alcoholism and a single kidney are a bad combination is a sufficiently wide-spread misconception (possibly inherent in the first of the two movie scenes described above), maybe I can put it into the sketch as still count on the interpretation I’m hoping for.
They could donate their Islets of Langerhans just because the term sounds so funny, and they’re very small regions in the pancreas that would be absurd to donate.
How about donating part of a liver, and then receiving a gift of a bottle of hard liquor? It might not be factually accurate that it’s a bad thing to drink booze with an abbreviated liver, but it sounds plausible enough for your purposes, and better than a kidney.
Saw a kids show yeaterday where a little boy saved and saved to buy his older brother a nice pair or boots for when he came back from the war. Older brother came back with only one leg. You probably can’t sell a leg though.
Seriously, I almost can’t throw a baseball for hitting practice. The studies available at the time that I donated seemed to show that the only significant risk was that the remaining kidney might be damaged. My son started playing Little League baseball two months after I donated, and I was terrified when helping coach that someone would hit a ball back to me and take out the one that remained.
