Win A Kidney On Reality TV
We’ve come to expect a no holds barred approach from reality TV. Nudity, violence, racism - we’ve seen it all - but organ donation? That’s the latest programming ploy from Endemol, the creators of Big Brother.
This Friday, Dutch viewers will tune in to watch as a terminally ill woman chooses from three possible recipients competing to win one of her kidneys. BNN’s ‘The Big Donor Show’ is attracting condemnation from all sides as politicians, kidney specialists and donor authorities lambaste the ethics of the controversial programme.
Station chairman, Laurens Drillich, defended the show saying, “The chance for a kidney for the contestants is 33%. This is much higher than that for people on a waiting list.” BNN’s former director died of kidney failure whilst on a transplant waiting list.
This is all in very poor taste, we thought to ourselves at Null. But this being the least of our concerns, we’ve come up with our top five things to do with your spare kidney. After all, everyone’s got one.
Top five ways to use your extra kidney
1. Sell it. The black market trade in organs, especially kidneys, is burgeoning. Dodgy backstreet doctors will relieve you of your spare organ for a tasty wad of cash, but be careful about where you go. It’s much better to use the organ pirates of Brazil, where you could earn up to $10,000, than the bandits of Baghdad who’ll only offer a meagre $1,400.
2. Eat it. You’re carrying around your very own main course – and you won’t even put on any weight by eating it. We can only find one reported instance of a man eating a human kidney, although it’s bound to have happened before. A member of the British military was sent the smuggled kidney of an executed Chinese prisoner as a birthday prank. He did the only reasonable thing: marinated it in a cream béchamel sauce with a tomato paste. By all accounts it was delicious.
3. Use it as a dowry. If you simply can’t get rid of a troublesome daughter then your extra kidney could be your saviour. An increasingly common practice in south and west India is to sell off a kidney in order to pass on your daughter. According to medical anthropologist Lawrence Cohen, parents can no longer complain about being unable to raise a dowry. “Haven't you got a spare kidney?”
4. Make kidney stones. A handy way to avoid months of agonising post-op pain and a lifetime of single kidney-dom is to keep your kidneys in their rightful place and turn your attentions to growing kidney stones. All you have to do is pee them out and sell them on. One of William Shatner’s stones recently sold for a mammoth $25,000. Nice work if you can get it.
5. Transplant it. Probably the only legal method to get rid of an unwanted kidney is simply, give it to someone else. Preferably someone who’s going to use it as a kidney and not as an ornamental paper weight.
Just to make it clear before any of you rush off to your local backstreet butcher to start making your organs pay – please, please, please don’t. Having a kidney removed will really hurt. A lot. And you’ll spend the rest of your life in fear that your one remaining kidney will die of loneliness, leaving you right up the Loop of Henle.
At the end of the day, kidneys make the piss, so don’t take the piss.
If you're still with us, why not try these:
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Image: Bryan Scott
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