But what if there was no remaining kidney to live on for 11 years? Would that make a difference?
Requiring dialysis several times a week really decreases quality of life. It's probably worse than going through chemotherapy for cancer which my grandfather eventually had to do for the last five years of his life.
I was reading a couple of years ago about one of the men shot by Charles Whitman from the tower at the University of Texas in 1966. He was shot in the kidney. When the surgeons operated on him, they found out that he had only developed one functioning kidney, and that was the kidney that was shot. He died recently, and the cause of death was recorded as homicide.