Read personal accounts from people who have received a living kidney donor transplant, including how they found a living donor, what they experienced during their transplant journey, and how their transplant has changed their lives.
When I was 25 years old, I was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease (PKD). The first indication that something was wrong was when I went in for a physical and they told me I had high blood pressure. They put me on high blood pressure pills. I didn’t know anything about kidney problems till later. PKD is such a silent situation—you don’t have any symptoms …
My kidney transplant journey began about a year before COVID, when I started feeling pain in my kidneys. I used to go in for lab testing every three months because I have been diabetic for many years. The next time I went in and told them about my pain, my physician said the pain was …
My kidney failure started in 2002, but I wasn’t told until 2011. In 2011 I got pretty sick—I couldn’t even get myself off the coach. I went to the ER and they thought I had meningitis, so they put me in the hospital. A doctor came in and said they did my test wrong: I didn’t have meningitis, but I was in kidney failure. I said, “What?” He told me to just call my regular doctor and walked out. I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe. It took me …
My kidney transplant journey started when I was 12. I had several symptoms, including swollen legs and high blood pressure. I was treated with steroids, but it didn’t work—I was still getting worse. My mother was my champion at first, searching for doctors and looking into what to do. My parents decided to fly from …
When we were living in Texas, I had a bout of gout. I’d never had it before in my life, and I didn’t think anything of it. After we moved back to New York, where we have lived most of our lives and raised our kids, I developed this horrible winter itch, which I thought …
Back in 2009, when Aiden was four years old, he started showing symptoms of kidney issues. He was peeing blood—it was so red it looked like fruit punch. We took him to the pediatrician (not his regular pediatrician), and he dismissed it. He thought it was juice. Well, I don’t give my kids juice—that was blood. We took him back to his regular pediatrician, and he ordered a kidney ultrasound. Before we …
In 2021, at his annual physical, our then-23-year-old son’s lab work came back with too much protein in his urine. He was referred to a nephrologist and had a biopsy. We were shocked to learn he had Stage 3 chronic kidney disease, with a GFR (glomerular filtration rate, a measure of kidney function) of 58.
On February 3, 2022, I was diagnosed with kidney failure. My life was turned upside down. I began dialysis treatments three days a week, each session lasting four long hours in a chair. At the time, I was living in Memphis, Tennessee, and the emotional and physical toll was unlike anything I had ever experienced. …
Oliver was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease when he was eight years old. His kidneys never really grew; the doctors don’t know why. We are an adoptive family, and we don’t have any information about the birth family. He didn’t really have any symptoms, but he had short stature, and when they started to investigate …