Have Yourself a Healthy Little Kidney

This parody (written by Greg Crowther) is sung to the tune of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane).

A semi-whimsical, semi-serious song about what it might be like, as a health-care provider, to do a kidney transplant as a sort of Christmas present for a patient in need.

Have yourself a healthy little kidney;
Let your blood be clean.
From now on, it won’t be filtered by machine!
Have yourself a healthy little kidney;
Whisk that waste away.
GFR may be 90,000 mils per day!

Here we are, in the abdomen,
Where the gift goes in, down low.
Blood gets rerouted there and back;
To the iliac it flows.

Through the years, you’ll stay immunotolerant,
If the drugs allow.
Steroids keep the lymphocytes in check somehow.
So have yourself a healthy little kidney now!

• MP3 (accompanied by Sing2Piano)

• music video (with Phil Crowther)

Songs like this one can be used during class meetings and/or in homework assignments. Either way, the song will be most impactful if students DO something with it, as opposed to just listening.

An initial, simple follow-up activity could be to answer the study questions below. A more extensive interaction with the song might entail (A) learning to sing it, using an audio file and/or sheet music as a guide, and/or (B) illustrating it with pictures, bodily poses, and/or bodily movements. The latter activity could begin with students identifying the most important or most challenging content of the song, and deciding how to illustrate that particular content.

(1) What is meant by the line, "From now on, it won't be filtered by machine!"?

(2) What does GFR stand for? What is the GFR mentioned in the song when converted to the more customary units of milliliters per minute?

(3) Is a new kidney put into a space left by the removal of an old, failing kidney, or elsewhere?

(4) What general class of steroids are used for immunosuppresion?