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It finally caught up to me!

Apr 26, 2024

2 min read

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Everyone has a different story about how they ended up on dialysis. There are known causes like diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure and family history, but there are the "unknowns" no one tells you about unless you read the fine print of your medication.


My issues started with diabetes... I ate what I wanted to eat and loved to drink sugary beverages. Add medication to help control it and get bladder cancer as a result of it. Recover from bladder cancer but, that cancer loved me and wanted to stay around so it found a new home in my liver. After a liver resection, the doctor said it just wasn't enough and put me on the transplant list. A year later, I had a new liver and started taking anti-rejection medicine. Diabetes still there, and now let's add high blood pressure. For 8 years, I would try to control my sugar and my blood pressure but, it finally caught up to me. The anti-rejection meds + high sugars + high blood pressure damaged my kidneys to the point of no return.


When you wake up in the morning throwing up, have nausea when eating, shake uncontrollably, barely having enough energy to take a shower, have extremely painful muscle cramps in the middle of the night and start having "fat" ankles, it wears you done. Your attitude sucks. You hate your life. You just want to sleep and you don't want to work. Oh, and now let's throw in being anemic, which has a whole new set of problems. There is no backtracking at this point.


When my kidney doctor said we need to start thinking about dialysis, I was thinking, "whatever...you must have the wrong chart." The next visit to the kidney doctor, he said, "we need to get you on dialysis immediately. You are in end stage renal failure."


That's when you say "What the FUCK????? How did I get here???"



Dialysis ahead
Dialysis ahead




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