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We're going to the Transpens Center at Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. And I'm here to get checked up and meet my surgeon before I give my kidney to a stranger.

I'm Dylan Matthews. I'm a writer of FOX and I host the Future Perfect podcast. I first started thinking about donating my kidney when I was 19. I was a sophomore in college, I think. And I read an article in the New Yorker called the Kindest Cut. It was by Larismic Farquhar and was about people who gave their kidneys to strangers.

And just seemed obvious I should do this. If you need a kidney, that probably means you're on dialysis. And if you're on dialysis, that means your kidneys failed. If you're on dialysis, you're hooked up to a machine for four hours a day, three days a week, typically. That's typically in a dialysis center or hospital. It's a physically exhausting process. You typically can't hold down a job. The death rate with dialysis is 25% in the first year and about two thirds within five years.

That's about the same as brain cancer. So you have a deadly disease. And if you were in that situation, you're on dialysis and you get a kidney from someone, typically your lifespan increases by 10 years. So just looking at the math, I'm able to extend the life of someone by 10 years.

The risk of death and surgery for someone like me who doesn't have high blood pressure is about one in 10,000. It increases my odds of kidney problems, which you would expect, but not that much. And I still have a 99% chance of being okay kidney wise.

Like the way I thought about it was just, what do I have that's going on that I shouldn't take this small risk to myself to give someone 10 years.

It's a long process and I documented a lot of it using my phone, taking video diaries, just following on our video team wanted to make a video about it.

And I thought that would be a good idea to show people what the process is like. And so she and I were filming stuff sort of as we went.

The big thing is that they have to make sure that your kidney is working reasonably well.

By this point, I've done two, 24-hour urine collection which I was curious to see sound. And they're all very inconclusive. So now I'm going to go get some radioactive particles shot through my kidneys.

They just put me in a room at the Hopkins Hospital and a variety of specialists came in. So there was a social worker who was going to be my advocate.

There was a psychologist to make sure I was of sound mind and no one was pressuring me. There was a kidney specialist who came in to make sure I wasn't taking any medications.

They would be bad to take on one kidney. I met the surgeon eight hours of meetings with various people on various aspects of this.

I had to wait a few weeks and I finally got approval. They mailed me a letter saying that I was approved to donate.

I took a little video of myself reading the letter with my cat.

So this is a letter I got today from Hopkins. Dear Dylan, you have been approved as a kidney donor by our multidisciplinary transplant team at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

On behalf of the Johns Hopkins Conference of Transplant Center, thank you for coming forward as a living kidney donor and we look forward to seeing you through your donation.

And even then it took a few months at least to schedule when I was going to do it because I wanted to do it so that I could set up what's called a chain.

If you need a kidney and you have a loved one who's willing to donate to you but you're not a match biologically, there's probably someone out there that they are a match to.

The idea with the chain is that you can get that person to donate if you can promise their loved one would get a kidney.

You set up a chain where their loved one gets a kidney and they get it from someone who also has a loved one who needs a kidney and on and on and on.

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