traitor-boyfriend:

traitor-boyfriend:

i love cherokee hair tampons so much but there is an exceptionally untapped well of stankyle angst surrounding it considering kyle could very well die before he’s even thirty

thirty honestly was a tad bit premature for the sake of being dramatic but not that crazy

so kyle gets a kidney transplant at eight years old. transplants don’t last forever; the average lifespan for a kidney depends on the donor – if they’re a living relative it’s about fifteen years, twelve for a deceased donor, and an unrelated but living donor is somewhere between the two. be generous and say kyle’s kidney lasts him fourteen for an even number. that would mean sometime in kyle’s early twenties his transplanted kidney would begin to fail

now, in the episode, the doctor tells stan that he wouldn’t be able to give kyle his kidney b/c they don’t share the same blood type, and the only person who shares kyle’s blood type (ab negative) is cartman, which is why they need one of his kidneys. when i was thinking about this like a year ago i was under the impression that this was true, but it actually isn’t; not only does the rh factor (the presence/lack thereof of an antigen that designates someone’s blood positive or negative) not matter in transplants, ab blood is actually a universal recipient. they can receive an organ from anyone. so stan very well could donate one of his kidneys to kyle (as could ike, theoretically, or any member of kyle’s family as an immediate consideration) though this doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a very compatible match

but! let’s follow the show’s logic to make this even more difficult. say that stan is an incompatible donor and that a kidney donor needs to be an exact match in blood type save for universal donors – that would mean kyle could only receive a kidney from other ab negative donors or an o negative one. less than one percent of the population has ab negative blood, and about 6.6 percent of people have o negative. that is not a large margin of compatibility

there’s a lot of factors that go into someone’s priority for organ donation. kidneys are by far in the highest demand and in low supply relative to this. at any given time there are over 100,000 people in the u.s. alone on the kidney transplant wait list. the average wait time is somewhere between 3-10 years depending on the region and people die every day waiting; some people become too sick to be eligible for donation during the wait. children obviously get first priority. there’s also the matter of if someone has previously received a donation and antibodies present in your body – these make it much more difficult to match w a donor; immunocompromised people also have a much harder time since their bodies have increased difficulty fighting infections and are more likely to suffer complications transplant rejections. the physical matching – meaning, how closely the donor’s organ would fit in the recipients considering their body size – is another issue. there’s a lot more that goes into it but these are some major ones

so given how these apply to kyle, he could have a pretty difficult time finding a second kidney. and he could become too sick to receive one during the wait should he even be matched w a potential donor

the average span of time someone can live on dialysis is 5-10 yrs. dialysis doesn’t not work, but some people can become unable to tolerate the treatment depending on the severity of their condition. a lot of people decide to stop their dialysis treatment as they feel it does more to denigrate their quality of life than improve it, and go on to choose palliative care instead in anticipation for the end of their lives 

tl;dr kyle might not have such a long and fruitful life

Nooo…. This is not the kind of content I want on my dash. THS IS NOT OKAY.

LET MY BOY LIVE AND BE HAPPY DAMMIT 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭