On the left side of the photo, a polycystic kidney; on the right side, a normal and presumably frightened one.This is what a polycystic kidney looks like. Current theory is that some programming changes the tubules that are supposed to filter chemicals so they fill with fluid and blow up into cysts.Those then gradually crowd out healthy tissue until there's nothing left to do the kidney's job.
My father had polycystic kidney disease, and so I had a 50 percent chance of getting it, too. We're among half a million people in the U.S. with this disease, which is the most common inherited disease in the country.
My dad went onto dialysis when I was a freshman in college, and got a kidney transplant during the Christmas break when I was a junior. He still has it, 22 1/2 years later!
The weird part about my kidney disease is it doesn't affect the things you'd assume it would -- like urinating. Instead, I've got:
- high blood pressure (was 189/118 unmedicated 12 years ago. Can't imagine what it would be now!)
- fatigue (I brought an Ikea Poang chair in to work a year ago, after I figured out I was often literally too tired to hold my head up, but I could still edit, e-mail and write as long as I had something to lean back on. People thought it looked pretty odd at first, but they've adapted.)
- anemia (This may be the main contributor to the fatigue, bruising, etc. And it prevents me from giving blood at the Red Cross.)
- digestive problems (Pretty much Murphy's Law on this one, for various reasons)
- muscle cramping (Learned to sleep without flexing my lower legs and feet, after months of waking up yelling)
- bruising (The other night I showed my husband my legs, spotted with bruises here and there from mishaps I didn't even remember. "They look like overripe bananas," he commented. No, amazingly enough, he has no new bruising from this encounter!)
Add in the delight of suddenly getting low blood sugar reactions (I can't tell when I'm hungry anymore) bad breath (all that trash piling up again, don't ya know) and freaky stuff like horizontal valleys in my nails, and you can imagine how all-encompassing and puzzling this illness is. "Huh. Is this a new symptom of the same old thing or something I need to worry about?"
Fortunately enough, I don't have a lot of excess energy to spend worrying, thanks to stuff like:
- sleep disturbances (This runs the gamut from not being able to stay awake during the day to not being able to sleep at night. I also suspect my increasing rate of "bad dreams" over the years -- complete with screaming, yelling at people and hitting them in my sleep -- has to do with free-floating chemicals that should have been flushed from my brain)
- what specialists call "cloudy thinking." More on that later. If I remember... ; )
http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition=polycystickidneydisease
