I’ve lived with End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) since I was 9. ESRD is permanent kidney failure. Dialysis, a process that filters your blood when your kidneys no longer can, is what keeps me alive. I’ve spent over 20 years on dialysis, and I now do treatments at home several times a week. I worked most of my adult life, taking advantage of reliable private insurance from my employers for my costly treatments. That coverage helped me stay independent and maintain my health. But I recently became quite ill and had to stop working. My only option to supplement Medicare [...]

As a caregiver for my late father-in-law on dialysis – the only treatment for kidney failure outside of a transplant – I saw firsthand how taxing kidney disease can be. My wife, a nurse, handled his home dialysis treatments day after day. I helped wherever I could – driving him to appointments, shaving him when he could no longer manage, and offering the emotional support both he and my wife needed. Dialysis didn’t just affect him. It shaped our entire family’s life. We gave everything to help him stay home, stay comfortable, and maintain his dignity. Thankfully, he had sufficient [...]

I’m writing not just as a nurse, but as a wife and caregiver. My husband Kenneth was diagnosed with IgA nephropathy at just 20 years old. That disease slowly damaged his kidneys, leading to kidney failure and the need for dialysis, a treatment that does the work of the kidneys by cleaning the blood when the kidneys can no longer do so. For the past decade, we’ve built our life around his treatment. We started with peritoneal dialysis at home, which involved using a catheter and fluid exchange to filter his blood overnight while he slept. When that was no [...]