Kidney Failure

Please, if anyone … well a doctor tells you that you have trouble with the blood vessels at the back of your eyes… go and get your kidneys checked!!  Both of the vessels in your eyes and kidneys are related.  You could prevent some serious trouble.

My late husband was in kidney failure for several years before they finally stopped working. fact, you can live with 10% function of each of your kidneys … or even survive with one kidney.  As long as the function is above 10%.  Doesn’t mean that you will feel great!  In fact you will be extremely tired.  Your legs will retain water and your skin will become unbearably itchy due to the toxins building up in your system. You will throw up a lot too… and generally feel horrible.

We were not told during my late husband’s eye exams, nor by his endocrinologist that his eye issues were a precursor to his kidneys failing.  His first issues with his eyes were in late 1990’s.  It wasn’t until 2001 that we were told his kidney function had dropped below 15% for both kidneys.  At that point we had had our first child and I was expecting our second. The fall of 2006, he began to become even more tired that he usually was and his skin was crazy itchy!  Which put him in a bad mood. :(I had our second daughter in November 2006 and by May 2-4 Weekend 2007 he was in complete kidney failure.  I thought he looked so gray that day… but he was fighting me on calling the doctor… he just wanted to sleep.  I had to pick up a prescription and needed to get out of the house with the kids so, we weren’t far from Drug store …. so I walked with the girls to the store.  But before I left, I told him to call the doctor to make an appointment.

By the time I came home, I could not wake him up!  He was unconscious. I called for the ambulance to come and we all rushed to the hospital.  He was in kidney failure and if it was any longer, there would have been nothing left to do for him.  He spent almost a month in the hospital getting settled in on a schedule and making sure he would be ok.   I will say that it was good thinking on his part in the summer time to have insisted that the doctors put in a fistula into his arm for dialysis.

A fistula is where they surgically put your vein and artery together.  Stitching a “whirlpool”, if you will … as the blood flows in and out in the one section.  If you were to put your fingers on top of this “snake” on his arm, you could feel the turbulence… if felt like the sound bees make buzzing .. if that makes sense.  The reason for this fistula is for the dialysis machine… in that section you can see a picture of his arm and how it functioned with the machine.  If he had not insisted in the summertime to have had this surgery, the dialysis machine would have had to have hooked up in his neck.

The bad thing about the kidney failure… besides the overall failure of his kidneys… was that he was a diabetic.  The kidneys filter the blood and clear all the toxins including moving sugar throughout the body.  But if you kidneys are not working right or at all… the sugar and insulin your system will “sit” in your system.  And this caused issues, because the insulin in his system would act sometime later than when it was supposed to… or be absorbed into his system to lower his sugars.   This unfortunately cause so many low blood sugars leading up to the ultimate failure of his kidneys.

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chronic-kidney-disease/symptoms-causes/dxc-20207466

Chronic symptoms may include:

  • Poor appetite
  • Vomiting
  • Bone pain
  • Headache
  • Malaise
  • High urine output or no urine output

It's only a BAD DAY if you say it is