Dialysis Patient Citizens

In 2017, while working in Melbourne, Australia, I became unable to walk three city blocks without stopping to catch my breath. Within hours of reaching the ER, I’d had two blood transfusions and was in the ICU. I found out one kidney had never fully developed, and the other was only 2% functional.

I spent 15 months on hemodialysis before receiving a transplant in 2018....

I was first diagnosed with kidney disease in 2001, shortly after the birth of my second daughter. What doctors thought was pregnancy-related high blood pressure turned out to be the start of kidney failure. For years, I tried to push forward, working full time and raising my girls, until my health declined sharply in 2010, and I went into a hypertensive crisis.

I start...

My sister and I have polycystic kidney disease and shared the same dialysis schedule for years. I’ve been on dialysis nearly 15 years, surviving heart surgery and breast cancer before receiving a kidney transplant last October. My sister was not so lucky.

After losing private insurance through divorce, she refused disability, believing she couldn’t survive on those ben...

During my final year of college, I nearly died. What began as abdominal pain, misdiagnosed and mistreated, spiraled into sepsis that was shutting down my organs one by one. By the time I reached the hospital, I needed four units of blood and four hours of emergency dialysis before I could even have surgery. I was a college student on my parents’ private insurance with no clue...

My husband Greg was diagnosed with end-stage renal disease in 2006. He spent nearly seven years on dialysis before receiving a kidney transplant in 2013. For over a decade, that transplant gave him his life back. Then, in late 2023, complications from COVID caused his transplant to fail, and in October 2024, he returned to dialysis.

The second time has been far harder ...