How It Happened

One of the many remarkable things about our kidneys – and believe me, I've done enough reading and research to go for my master's in kidney – is that they can go right along performing their vital functions –  filtering the blood, producing urine, eliminating toxic wastes, reducing excess sodium and potassium, manufacturing active Vitamin D – until they lose up to 80 percent of their normal function. Don't you wish you could do your job at full capacity while only exerting 20 percent of your energy?

Anyway, that's where I am now. At my last visit to my nephrologist (kidney specialist), warm and straightforward Dr. Abdel-Moneim Attia (ah-TEE-ya) at the Carle Clinic in Champaign, I learned that my lab work revealed my total kidney function had declined from 24 to 19 percent. Yikes. One doesn't suddenly regain function; kidney damage, I'm told, is irreversible. The trick now is to maintain what I have left.

How the heck did this happen? Some people damage their kidneys due to injury or trauma, diabetes, genetics, abuse of painkillers or other drugs. I, however, basically did it to myself, because I ignored for too long a condition all too common to African American men 30 and older: soaring, uncontrolled hypertension, or high blood pressure.

Your blood pressure should be somewhere around 120/80 to be within the normal range. Even with a battery of medications (and we'll talk more about pills later), mine is running around 135/90, but it's coming down steadily.

An emergency room physician at Providence Hospital in Detroit once explained it to me best, I think. "When your blood pressure is too high," he said, "blood just pounds against your arteries with every beat, as if you kept pounding your fist against a wall. Now, nothing might happen to that wall right away, but over the course of time if you keep pounding away, eventually you're going to damage that wall. Same with your blood pressure. Eventually, something's got to give." For me it was my kidneys, and what a mook I feel like today for not having manned up and dealt with the problem sooner.

People – especially men, especially black men – please do not do as I have done. If you are diagnosed with high blood pressure, do something to control it. Diet, exercise, medication – something. Believe me, ignorance is not bliss. Not forever, anyway.