Martinez Majors, Sr. of Alexandria Virginia, 65, had no idea his kidneys were failing. Then, three years ago, a severe case of edema landed him in the hospital.
“I was bloated. My legs looked like somebody took an air hose and just plugged it into my body,” he says. “The blood tests came back.
Whoever the doctor was who was on duty told me, ‘You have chronic kidney disease.’” Majors, whose kidney failure was caused by hypertension, now spends more than four hours each Monday, Wednesday and Friday tethered to a dialysis machine that filters waste from his blood the way his kidneys no longer can. The intensive and often exhausting regimen keeps him and a half million other Americans with kidney failure — also known as End Stage Renal Disease — alive.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 in 7 people, or 37 million Americans, have chronic kidney disease , most often caused by diabetes and high blood pressure. And because the condition gradually progresses over months and sometimes years, most people are unaware they’re sick until — like Majors — they’re hospitalized and placed on dialysis. The treatment, however, is not a cure, rather it’s a stopgap with potentially serious side effects, including infection and strain to the cardiovascular system.
“And the only reversing of that is to get a new kidney — to have a kidney transplant,” Majors says. More than 90,000 people in the U.S.
are waiting for a kidney transplant. But .