Living
Well on
Dialysis
When a Kidney Transplant Fails
By Jewel Edwards-Ashman
After years, maybe a decade or even longer, of living with
chronic kidney disease you finally get the call from your doctor
letting you know that you’ll receive a kidney transplant. If it’s
successful, you’ll be able to quit your dialysis treatments.
You’ll have enough energy to run a marathon, or maybe just
walk up a flight of stairs. You’ll be able to d o whatever you’ve
been putting on hold because of your health. You’re not even
thinking about another round of kidney failure in the future,
and most transplant recipients aren’t. Organ failure, however,
is something most transplant recipients will likely face more
than once in their lifetime.
I had very few complications in the first few years following my
own kidney transplant. Then I became pregnant, miscarried
in my second trimester, and ended up undergoing treatment
for an acute episode of organ rejection. All of those events left
me with decreased kidney function, and I soon learned that my
transplanted kidney would likely fail after about five to seven
years. My initial reaction: This is not how things were supposed
to go. Since then, I’ve been trying to mentally and emotionally
prepare myself for a second round of kidney failure.
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