Actually, this very nice piece isn’t about PKD at all — it’s about glomerulonephritis. But the result is the same: three hours of dialysis, three days a week, while you hope for a transplant.
Since the first dialysis machine appeared in 1943, these artificial kidneys have kept many people alive. Dialysis greatly prolonged my uncle Dick’s life, keeping him alive long enough to get the transplant that restored most of what his life used to be. But by all accounts, actually being on dialysis sucks.
As this writer describes it: “I tried to stick it out for the rest of the semester, undergoing dialysis while trying to maintain the life of an average Loyola College freshman. But the treatments exhausted me, and eventually I had to drop out. I moved back home to Pennsylvania, where I sat in my childhood bedroom for the rest of the school year contemplating what the doctors said could be an alternative to dialysis: a kidney transplant.”
The first transplant she received didn’t take, so she needed another one. She got the second from her boyfriend. He sounds like a hell of a guy.
I take Tolvaptan in the hope that it will help me and millions of others avoid all that. If it works, and PKD stops ruining kidneys, 5,000 spaces on the kidney-transplant waiting list will open up in the U.S. alone.
Let’s hope it does. I’d hate to think all this peeing is in vain.