Virginia Postrel Quotes

I've still got both kidneys, but one doesn't work, so I have to be careful not to drink too much, even water, and I have to keep myself as healthy as possible.

I was pretty bad. When I first was diagnosed with kidney failure, my function - the function of my kidney was less than 8 percent.

There is a risk of death associated with donating a piece of liver. It's about one in 500 for the risk of death. The risk of death of donating a kidney is about one in 3000, so this is a riskier operation than donating a kidney. The stakes are usually higher for the recipient of the transplant because unlike kidney failure, where you have a dialysis machine, in liver failure we don't have that kind of machine that allows a patient to survive until they can get a cadaver organ.

I'm a prime example of the way kidney disease strikes silently.

Twenty million more have Chronic Kidney Disease, where patients experience a gradual deterioration of kidney function, the end result of which is kidney failure.

I was in kidney failure. I ended up having a kidney transplant on my 21st birthday.

People who are living donors who give kidneys. You can't give a heart and you can't give a liver, but you can sure give a lung - well, kidneys, anyhow. And that's where the main part of this whole thing is - one out of every eight people, I believe, is going to have some kind of kidney problem during their lifetime.

A patient healthy enough to undergo a kidney transplant might someday no longer need dialysis. That would free up a slot for a new patient.

It was in 2003 that I realised there was no choice but to have dialysis treatment - by the time of the World Cup that year, I could barely walk. A year later, I finally had a kidney transplant.

Kidney donors don't have to be close relatives of recipients, but they do need to have the right blood type. And kidneys from living donors tend to last many years longer than kidneys from deceased donors.

Post-operatively the transplanted kidney functioned immediately with a dramatic improvement in the patient's renal and cardiopulmonary status.

The dialysis is to wash my blood, to keep my kidneys functioning.

My friend was on dialysis for six years before he got a new kidney. I was on dialysis for eight months. I'm almost not even the typical person who has kidney failure.

I blacked out in a Rite Aid. The doctor told me my heart function was at 5 percent. I spent two months in the hospital waiting to have a transplant. For me, that was the end of the world.

I had worked on dogs for a couple of years developing a renal transplant operation. We had dogs running around with kidneys we had transplanted back into themselves.

Five to six thousand people die every year waiting for organs, but nobody cares.

Often people expect I have some touching personal story about kidney disease, but it's actually the mathematics that led me to it.

I'd like people to know that you can head off kidney disease, maybe prevent a transplant or stop the disease from progressing after detection by doing a simple urine test in the doctor's office.

I had a test on my kidneys a few weeks back and found out I have two.

Kidney transplants seem so routine now. But the first one was like Lindbergh's flight across the ocean.

I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'

I was a healthy young man, and I thought I was invincible before I was diagnosed with kidney disease.

Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes minorities and the poor. Its celebrity spokesman is blue-collar comedian George Lopez, who received a kidney from his wife.

If you don't have dialysis, absolutely, you will die. Dialysis is actually keeping me alive.

We are born with two kidneys and only need one to survive. Maybe God gave us the other one so that we could give it away.