The kidney was sold for $3,200, enough to buy an iPhone 4

Dec 31, 2018 03:42 GMT  ·  By

Many people joke that selling kidneys is the only way they could afford to buy an iPhone given how expensive Apple’s devices are getting these days, but a 17-year-old Chinese boy took the whole thing literally and did just that.

No less than seven years ago, Xiao Wang, 17 at that time, decided to sell one of his kidneys to buy an iPhone 4, as this was pretty much the only way he could have afforded the device.

The iPhone was so popular in his school that Wang just wanted to have one, so as he was ready to give up on one of his kidneys he paid a visit to an underground hospital in his country.

The kidney extraction surgery brought him around $3,200, according to reports, enough to purchase the iPhone 4 he always wanted.

Fatal trade-off

Unfortunately, however, despite the hospital assuring him that everything would go perfectly fine, the boy suffered a wound infection which eventually affected his other kidney too. When his parents found out, it was already too late, with Wang ending up having to do dialysis for the rest of his life.

The worst thing is that the family can barely cover the costs of the medical treatment now, and the boy is spending most of his days in bed.

The cost of having an iPhone is proving nearly fatal in this case, and with Apple’s smartphones becoming more expensive with every new generation, more teens are ready to go to great lengths to buy them.

iPhones have become a status symbol in many countries across the world, and given they are the preferred smartphones of teenagers, don’t be too surprised if more cases of people making such extreme trade-offs make the rounds anytime soon.