The Reason Why I Started This Blog

Last Wednesday, when I went for my appointment at the Joslin Clinic my endo said that she was concerned about my kidneys. She said that she didn’t like the way they were trending. I wasn’t too troubled by that because in the fall of 2005 I had problems with my kidneys, I was sick and I was taking maximum strength Tylenol according to the directions on the box. After about a week I wasn’t getting any better and I went to the doctor and he found that because of all the medications that I was taking my kidneys stop functioning and over time they came back to normal. So I was too worried over this latest development.

But when I got home and saw what was on my appointment summary sheet saying that I had “CKD (Chronic Kidney Disease) Stage 3, GFR 30 – 59 ml/min”. That didn’t sound good and when I researched it on the internet it sounds even worst.

• Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure, accounting for 44% of new cases in 2008.
• In 2008, 48,374 people with diabetes began treatment for end-stage kidney disease in the United States.
• In 2008, a total of 202,290 people with end-stage kidney disease due to diabetes were living on chronic dialysis or with a kidney transplant in the United States.

Now here is the really scary part…

The usual span of time between the onset of diabetic kidney injury and kidney failure is about five to seven years.

And I realized that diabetes was a lot more than just controlling your blood sugar, that it was rather insidious disease.

I wanted a forum to express my concerns and to vent my anxieties. I never had anything that was really wrong with me outside of the normal diseases of aging, but this just seems to be piling up one complication after another. And I don’t know how to handle it and it scares me, so that is why I started this blog to deal with my fears.