Ordinary Wednesday6/10/15We went to get bagels. As we pulled out of the parking lot my mom asked me if Anna had said anything to me. My mom has stage three kidney disease. What is that? What is stage four? What about a transplant? What are the treatments? Who do we talk to? Things can change so fast. Or they can change so slowly that you don't even notice. My mom has had kidney stones for years. She doesn't have the best diet in the world but she takes her pills, drinks her lemon water, she works out, supplements her omega 3s and all of that. But the kidney stones haven't gone away in 12 years. Every year or two now she is in the hospital on pain meds waiting for a larger stone to pass. "Worse than when you were born," is said often. But no doctor has ever said, "Hey, let's figure this out. Let's figure out what's causing these stones. Let's watch out for other things. You know, kidney stones can cause kidney disease. You should watch out for that. Why don't we set you up with a nutritionist? Let's get an appointment with a specialist." Her kidneys are at 50% function. 80% of people with stage three never reach stage four, kidney failure. But after a week of research, it looks like most people "beat" kidney disease by dying of heart disease or stroke. Kidney disease is caused by conditions in your body that are also hard on the rest of you. 80% of the people's kidneys just outlast the rest of their body. This makes her a lousy candidate for transplant. Her body is hurting her kidneys and it would hurt a new kidney too. Her dad was on dialysis for nine years. She doesn't want that. She's in her sixties and she's mad, but she's ready to go. The rest of us are not ready. Elizabeth started looking things up. She is a terrific researcher. Hannah (Registered Dietitian) came over for dinner and she did her own research. There's a lot we can do. There's a lot that my mom has been doing wrong. Chocolate is out (did I mention that she's ready to die?). Sugar is out. My mom has been doing bikram yoga for years. It causes you to sweat a lot. That's not bad per se, but if you don't aggressively replace the water lost, you're causing your kidneys to have to work harder. Your kidneys want to be floating in water all the time. My mom has been on all kinds of medications over the past several years. All of it goes through your kidneys. She recently underwent lithotripsy which attempts to break up kidney stones by applying 700 pounds of pressure to your kidneys through ultrasonic waves. The lesson is this. Doctors focus on symptoms, not health. Doctors today are wearing blinders, blinders made of insurance and liability and paperwork and specialization. They don't have time and they can't afford to look around. Sometimes they just don't have the knowledge about other systems. It makes more sense to focus on the issue at hand and get you back home as quickly as possible. The reality is that we all need to be in charge of our own health. We need to ask the questions and make sure we understand the answers. We need second and third opinions. We need to be in charge of our own health. The system is not watching out for you. It was the nutritionist that let my mom know she had stage three kidney disease. My mom's doctor had run the tests and gotten the results. But instead of going over the results with my mom, he sent her to a nutritionist. They were an hour into an appointment that my mom assumed was related to kidney stones before the nutritionist said something about living with stage three kidney disease. That's how she found out. That's how they finally informed her that her kidneys have been abused for more than a decade. |
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Frozen fog. 12/12/14
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