I am not a kidney patient - just unlucky.

The things I am most commonly asked as a person with kidney failure are 'how long have you had it?', 'is it hereditary?', 'how was it diagnosed?' To answer this properly I will wind it back to the start and July 2012. I was having a difficult time personally, not feeling well and generally a bit run down. That sort of time in your life where your relationship has broken up and you're living on your own, surviving on pot noodles, watching nature programmes and crying at them. I developed a really attractive stye on my eye which, given I was feeling a bit low about myself I did think was a bit of a kick in the teeth so I went to the doctor about it. Prior to this I had been experiencing quite severe headaches and palpitations which I had also just put down to being stressed and I had taken extra strong pain killers and gone to bed early. Whilst I was at the Docs for help with the stye I mentioned the headaches and the doc took my blood pressure. It was 176/117 the average reading for blood pressure is 120/80 so obviously mine was rather on the high side. I was immediately prescribed blood pressure meds and referred to the hospital for a scan because high blood pressure can damage your kidneys and the Doctor wanted to have them checked out. At the time what I didn't know is that high blood pressure can also be caused by something wrong with your kidneys.

I assumed at the time that I was being sent for a routine scan. I knew I had not been feeling quite myself and it was a bit of a relief to know it was just my blood pressure (quite high I admit, but manageable with meds). So I filled my prescription, took my pills and when the time came I trotted off blissfully unaware to my appointment.

The day of the appointment at Leicester General I was gigging at a friends wedding in the evening so my mind was on other things, like playlists and wedding songs that don't make people feel depressed (there aren't many). During the scan the radiographer told me that I had 'bright' kidneys - thank you very much I said they are always most useful during a particularly tricky episode of University Challenge. Bright kidneys as it turns out actually means that they are echogenic, which means they glow on a scan, which indicates an underlying glomerular disease. The same chap also informed me that I had a large gall stone - which until this point I had known nothing about. I went to the hospital with high blood pressure and came out with stones and kidneys with a higher than average IQ. It really didn't mean a lot to me at this point and off I went to my gig, merrily, it wasn't till a few days later that I had my first gall bladder attack.

I appreciate most people reading this won't have kidney failure but I am sure some of you will have had gall stones and they are possibly the most painful thing in the world. I laid on the floor in my bungalow, I was living in at the time and thought I was dying the pain was so severe. It turns out that my yet undiagnosed diseased kidneys had trigged some seriously high cholesterol which in turn had given me these ridiculous stones. I had them removed at a later date which I will blog about in a different post - it is well worth recounting.

The odd thing about my diagnosis is that no one actually sat me down and told me. One day in September of the same year I was talking to my GP on the telephone about some blood results and he casually said in the conversation 'of course you are CKD stage 3' which was news to me and to be honest I didn't know what he meant so I just agreed, as you do, and got off the call and googled it, as you do. CKD is Chronic Kidney Disease and stage 3 means that your kidneys are not functioning properly (somewhere between 30-59). I was at work. I didn't know anything about kidney disease. I didn't know there were different conditions and once Google told me there were I didn't know which one I had. I rang my mum and dad. I googled it again. I felt worried, not complete meltdown worry but certainly a niggle. There was clearly something wrong with me. My kidneys weren't bright after all, they weren't working properly.

So, that was it. I was a kidney patient. Not yellow. Not in pain. Not fully aware of what it meant. Apart from the fact that I now got raffle tickets through the post to raise money for kidney services. To be honest at that point that was all my diagnosis meant to me, entry into the odd draw I didn't want to be entered into and feeling unlucky.