New York Has World-Class Hospitals. Why Is It So Bad for People in Need of Transplants?

By Ted Alcorn

Kehinde Majekodumi does not look desperately ill. A vibrant 24-year-old, she bears little outward sign except a scar beneath her collarbone where a catheter was once inserted.

But three times a week she deviates from her regular commute between the apartment she shares with her twin sister and her job in a university admissions office to a dialysis center in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.

There she spends four hours hooked up to a machine that substitutes for her failing kidneys. As it removes waste products from her bloodstream, it can induce terrible cramps, and each session leaves her weary and nauseated. But it is all that is keeping her alive.

“Unless I tell people, they don’t know,” Ms. Majekodumi said. “I don’t mind telling people, but I don’t want that to be the thing they know me for.”

She is one of around 8,500 New Yorkers with organ failure who are currently awaiting the only treatment that can meaningfully change their lives — an organ transplant.

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Source: The New York Times