Table 4 Other living kidney donation experiences that participants reported

Having others more worried than donor about donation

Q20: “I think my family was much more afraid than I was.”

Having blind faith in the donation process

Q21: “It just hit me in the head, like, why not? Let’s see if it will work. I never had any fear. I had total faith in it. I don’t know why.”

Having more knowledge helps

Q22: “I just tried to get fully educated on it, as did my family… It lessened all the concerns a lot to the point where there wasn’t a lot of concern going into it.”

Quality of care

Q23: “It’s my honor to have gone where I have gone, and Johns Hopkins was absolutely wonderful.”

Sense of helping others

Q24: “How relatively easy it is to do something that has an incredible benefit for somebody else. I wish I had known that.”

Being a non-directed donor

Q25: “I would have liked more counseling about the ‘what ifs’ if I did decide to know the recipient.”

Thoroughness of evaluation

Q26: “I was really surprised at how thoroughly I had to be checked and rechecked and examined and re-examined.”

Donor follow-up

Q27: “After you make the donation of your kidney, nobody from that hospital where you donated said, ‘Hey, come back in here so we can check you’re doing okay.’“

Pressure to donate

Q28: “In some ways I feel like related donors need even more protection because of this underlying assumption that you’ll do it and it leaves very little space to say you don’t want to do it.”

Cost or finances^a

Q29: “We qualified for one of those grants because we’re a couple. Maybe have information on there about the grants.”

Donor entitlement

Q30: “There was a sense of entitlement from some recipients, their physicians, their teams. There was a thought that you’re like taking a medication off the shelf.”

Race

Q31: “Some people, being African American, were like, I’m not going to give up a body part to anyone.”