19:30pm Evening Meeting -

Two amazing stories told firstly of the generosity of one healthy older man who wanted to help others and generously donated one of his kidneys and the path he took to achieve that.  The other from Tracey about the life changing benefits that accrued as a recipient of another donated kidney.

The National Kidney Federation
This is an important national UK registered charity.  Our speaker Tracey Sinclair was diagnosed with kidney failure at the age of 37 and this led her to join and assist the work the Federation did. they work closely with MP's on Parliamentary committees.

The NKF has 6 advocacy officers who helped individual patients across the UK.  Chronic kidney disease, chronic in this case meaning it never gets better, is often picked up in blood tests.

We learned about IGA neuropathy, PKD or Polycystic kidney disease, treatment with frequent dialysis, sometimes as often as 4 times a day.  Patients often find their ability to remove liquids from the body is bad, as the kidney filtration get blocked with the diseases.  Disease affects food tastes, and fluid intake has to be severely limited in some people's cases.  All in all there quality-of-life is severely challenged.

Kidney donation can save an individual and dramatically improve the quality of their life.  Nonetheless most will need immuno suppressant tablets and side effects are common.  There is a problem with finding sufficient donors of kidneys from both living and deceased patients.  Only one in 6 kidneys recovered from donors who have died are found to be acceptable, although living kidneys are much better.  Kidney operations are complicated with the risk of one in 3000 who will die.  It's a big three-hour operation.

Our 2nd speaker discussed the reasons for his donation of a live kidney stop he also gave a most interesting insight into the process whereby people are thoroughly screened and mentally checked to ensure they are doing the right thing.  We were advised that it was an emotional process but the reward at the end when you know you have saved someone's life or changed it dramatically for the better was really worth while.

We were asked to make sure that we considered a donor card and that this was recorded online as well is on the card carried on the person stop there are limits as to the ages of donors and further information can be obtained from the National kidney Federation's website.

www.kidney.org.uk
www.wessexkpa.org.uk
www.worldkidneyday.co.uk/#