Introduction

My kidneys failed (stage 5 renal failure) in October of 2009.  I went to the hospital because, frankly, my wife insisted that I do it.  I honestly thought that I was getting weaker because I had stopped working out, and ignored all the other things that were wrong with me (dizziness, shortness of breath, lack of balance, loss of appetite, etc.).

Anyway, my wife and I got into a cab and we went to the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital.  I figured that I would just be there for a few hours; I did not see home again for three weeks.

The toughest - but not most painful - part of my hospital stay was learning that I had ESRD or End Stage Renal Disease, which is the fifth and final stage of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD).  The only options for me were:

• death; (um, no thank you)
• a kidney transplant; (odds of this are really low in light of the 90,000 or so individuals ahead of me on the recipient list)
• dialysis; or
• a miraculous recovery (not happening, but there's always hope)

In case you're interested, the most painful part of my hospital stay was having a catheter shoved all the way down my penis into my bladder for urine recovery.  They say that it hurts going in, and they are right!  For the record, they also say that it doesn't hurt when it's taken out, and that is a damn lie.  Irt hurts just as bad.

Dialysis is the procedure by which excess fluids and "poisons" are removed from the human body when the kidneys no longer function as they should.  There are different methods; the method I chose was three times a week (Monday-Wednesday-Friday) at four hours per session (actually, my sessions last 4.25 hours).

From the beginning I was very hard-headed about the whole procedure.  I fought the process and the staff every step of the way.  It took an entire year for me to get with the program.