A diagnosis of chronic kidney disease can lead to unanswerable “what ifs,” urgent lifestyle changes, anxiety and depression. In this episode of “Read. Talk. Grow.”, author Abby Jimenez explains her portrayal of kidney disease in her book “Yours Truly” as well as her own diagnosis. Dr. Mira Keddis lends her expertise to explain what kidney disease is and how it can profoundly affect your life.
We talked with:
- Abby Jimenez is a New York Times bestselling author and Food Network champion living in Minnesota. Abby founded Nadia Cakes out of her home kitchen back in 2007. She is also the author of five bestselling novels. Abby loves a good romance, coffee, doglets and not leaving the house. “Yours Truly” is her latest book.
- Mira Keddis, M.D., is a consultant and associate professor of medicine in the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension at Mayo Clinic in Phoenix/Scottsdale, Arizona. Dr. Keddis is passionate about education and supporting and advocating for patients, learners and faculty.
We talked about:
In this episode, Dr. Millstine and her guests discuss:
- The silent nature of kidney disease. Unfortunately, kidney disease often does not have obvious symptoms. Instead, symptoms may be gradual and attributed to stress or exhaustion. Most standard lab tests can quickly identify if something is wrong with your kidneys. But if you’re not receiving regular medical checkups, problems may fly under the radar.
- The mental burden of chronic disease. Chronic diseases such as kidney disease can exacerbate mental health challenges and lead to depression and anxiety. Even in the early stages of disease, the “what ifs” can get to you, Abby says: What if I can’t eat my favorite foods? What if I need to go on dialysis?
- The transformative power of kidney transplant. Facing a lifetime of dialysis is a traumatic proposition, Dr. Keddis says. Abby’s book portrays the transformative power and hope that a kidney transplant can bring. We break down the types of kidney transplants and what transplant entails.
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- Purchase “Yours Truly.”
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- From Barnes & Noble
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Read the transcript:
Dr. Denise Millstine: Welcome to the “Read. Talk. Grow.” podcast, where we explore women’s health topics through books. In the same way that books can transport us to a different time, place or culture, “Read. Talk. Grow.” demonstrates how books can also give a new appreciation for health experiences and provide a platform from which women’s health can be discussed. At “Read. Talk. Grow.” we use books to learn about health conditions in the hopes that we can all lead happier, healthier lives.
I’m your host, Dr. Denise Millstine. I’m an assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic in Arizona, where I practice women’s health, internal medicine and integrative medicine. I am always reading and I love discussing books with my patients, my professional colleagues, and now with you.
Today we’ll be talking about chronic kidney disease. As most of you hopefully know, the kidneys are incredibly powerful organs balancing our fluid status, acid base balance, all of our chemistries and making urine to get rid of waste products. What you may not know is, according to the CDC, more than 1 in 7 U.S. adults, or 37 million people in the United States, are estimated to have chronic kidney disease. Even more worrisome, as many as 9 out of 10 of those with chronic kidney disease aren’t even aware of it. Kidney disease can manifest in many different ways. We’re going to delve into that today. Our book today is “Yours Truly” by Abby Jimenez. Abby Jimenez is a New York Times bestselling author and Food Network champion who lives in Minnesota.
Abby founded Nadia Cakes out of her home kitchen back in 2007. She’s also the author of five bestselling novels. Abby loves a good romance, coffee and not leaving the house. “Yours Truly”is her latest book. Abby, welcome to the show.
Abby Jimenez: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I’m really looking forward to my next trip to Minnesota so I can try Nadia Cakes. I’ve been reading about it for way too long now to not have ever had it. Our second guest is Dr. Mira Keddis. She’s a consultant and associate professor of medicine in the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. Dr. Keddis is passionate about education and supporting and advocating for her patients, learners and faculty. She’s the associate dean of faculty affairs for the Mayo Clinic Alex School of Medicine. Mira, welcome to the show.
Dr. Mira Keddis: It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Our book is “Yours Truly” by Abby Jimenez. This is a romance novel centered on two emergency medicine physicians, Briana and Jacob, whose paths cross at difficult times in each of their lives. One character, Briana’s brother Benny, will be the focus of our conversation today. Benny has been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and kidney failure as a young man, which has certainly taken its toll on him, but is also a worry for Briana, who has enough on her plate in this novel. Abby, your books are romance, but you intentionally include health conditions and health issues in all of them. Tell us how you decide to include these issues.
Abby Jimenez: Romances exist around real life. Everybody has something going on. It just feels natural to me to include real life issues in my books, like infertility. That’s a huge one when you’re in a relationship with somebody, whether or not you want to have or can have kids. Domestic violence has been depicted in my books and in this one, it was really important to me for us to see how much Jacob’s contribution to Benny’s health journey mattered to her. Jacob does donate a kidney to Benny in the book. It just felt natural to me to have those real-life issues in my stories.
Dr. Denise Millstine: We talked earlier with Susan Wiggs about her book, “Sugar and Salt,” about reproductive rights, and she said almost the exact same thing. These issues don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen intertwined in all the other parts of life that people are always navigating and I love that romance promises us that at the end there will be a resolution.
It’s not always going to be a happily ever after, but it does guarantee us so we can almost get into some of those darker and more challenging topics in this genre. Mira, many of our listeners may not have thought much about chronic kidney disease or thought about what it looks like. Can you talk us through what are some common ways you see people realizing they have chronic kidney disease, the symptoms of presentation?
Dr. Mira Keddis: The kidney is not like a heart. You get chest pain. You probably have heart problems. The kidneys don’t hurt when they’re failing or you and you’re losing function. The majority of the time, I would say the bulk of our referrals come from patients whose primary doctor checked their bloodwork and it’s a blessing that creatinine, which is a marker of kidney function, is included in almost any basic blood test that you will get from your doctor, and it pops up. Then all of a sudden you are told that your function is below what’s expected for your age, or expected for your gender, and there are some variabilities there.
It’s almost always based on an abnormal lab. The concern is, as you pointed out, many people don’t know that. That speaks to some extent to access to care, and having some insight to monitor for kidney function. But also the concern is when it ends up being too late. The other struggle with kidney diseases is again, kidneys don’t hurt when your kidneys are failing.
Pain is not a main symptom, but you don’t feel well. Sometimes that can get missed. Maybe it’s believed to be from something else. That’s how critical the kidney is. It affects every part of your body. The presentation can be tricky.
Dr. Denise Millstine: In Benny’s case, he gets pretty sick very fast, but usually it’s this slow progressive disease that, like you said, people might not feel well, but are able to pass that off on: “I’m not sleeping well,” or “have a lot of stress at work,” or many different reasons that they have these nonspecific symptoms. Luckily, if you’re seeing doctors regularly, you hopefully have had some blood tests that can detect kidney disease and ideally that gets detected at an earlier stage.
Abby, you put an enormous amount of research and work into portraying the health conditions in your books accurately. For example, we meet Bennie in the emergency department and he’s quite ill. He’s septic. He has an overwhelming infection and the infection is in his dialysis catheter, which is literally his lifeline. It’s what allows him to have filtration in his system through the medical system.
But he’s overwhelmed and he hasn’t addressed it and he’s let it get really bad. Talk about introducing Bennie at that stage.
Abby Jimenez: I really wanted us to see how depressed and how far down Benny’s illness had taken him. Benny is a 27-year-old character in the book, and Briana, who’s a 35-year-old main character, that’s her little brother, and Benny has Berger disease. It came on very quickly. It’s an autoimmune disease and he went from zero to kidney failure within 18 months. In the back of the book I talk about my own experience with chronic kidney disease. That’s really what inspired this representation in the book. In 2020 I was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and an autoimmune disease that was causing it, and I very much mirrored my own feelings at the time in Benny. It was how I would have felt about it had my condition progressed to the point that his did.
We meet him in the E.R., and he’s really in a bad place. You can see that he’s not taking care of himself, he’s hasn’t been taking care of his catheter, he’s not showering, and we really jump right in and see what a bad place he’s in and how this is affecting Briana, the main character, as well, because it affects everybody around you when somebody you love isn’t doing well.
Dr. Mira Keddis: That goes to the point where oftentimes when we’re young we’re not getting labs checked. There are no other ways to know if your kidney’s working or not. It is the truth that autoimmune diseases affect the younger generation. It’s unfortunately a perfect storm. You’ve got autoimmune disease affecting the younger generation that’s not getting the lab monitoring that could help detect early kidney disease.
Abby Jimenez: When I wrote this book, I had a nephrologist who advised me, Dr. Jared Fialkow over in Indiana, and I said to him that I don’t always like to put the exact name of the illness on my characters because it opens it up to scrutiny. I’m not, I’m not a doctor. I might get it wrong here or there, but I do like to know what is going on with my characters so that I can portray what’s happening to them accurately, even if I don’t name it. I said what would cause this in a young man. It would come on quickly, but if he gets a kidney transplant he could be in remission and live a relatively normal life going forward. That’s what he told me would do that.
It was very shocking to me and my own experience with CKD that this can be happening to you. You can have no idea. I was completely healthy and had no outward symptoms of this and by the time I went to the doctor to get my own labs run, and I did get physicals every year, my proteinuria was at 6000.
It was not looking good, and it was so important for me to explain this to readers and for readers to understand that kidney disease is silent. You won’t have any signs of it until you’re in stage 3. It’s just so important to get those labs running and get checked.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I just want to slow it down a little bit to catch our readers up that CKD is commonly how we refer to chronic kidney disease. Then Abby said proteinuria. Mira, tell us a little bit about protein in the urine and what’s normal, what that can look like.
Dr. Mira Keddis: For the outside world, check your blood test. If your blood tests look good, then you move on. Just as Abby mentioned, kidney disease is a silent disease. Looking at the urine, urine is like gold for a nephrologist because you can learn so much, but you get to look. There are a lot of diseases similar to what Abby shared, especially the ones where you have a filter problem, where you’re spilling a lot of protein, even if the function itself of the kidney is completely normal, a lot of diseases can present with just a spill of protein.
Unless someone checks a urine sample — that doesn’t take a lot, it’s literally just the small amount of urine that gets analyzed in your checking if you have protein or not? If there is protein that should raise many red flags and that should really start the workup. Proteinuria is protein in the urine. It is not normal. You should not have protein in your urine. You can detect that in some simple tests as simple as a urine analysis. That’s a really pertinent part of checking the health of your kidney. It’s not just bloodwork, it’s bloodwork plus a urine sample.
Dr. Denise Millstine: You mentioned that you had in your mind the disease that Benny had, but opted not to name it, which I think for me as a reader makes his experience broader and more universal. Because certainly the most common cause of chronic kidney disease in the United States is diabetes and hypertension, although we see that manifest typically in an older patient.
The end results, the going through dialysis, the dietary management that has to happen, the assessment for transplant, all of that does converge. Mira, correct me if this is wrong, but almost regardless of what incited the kidney disease, that these phases that we watch with Benny, it could have come from many different causes. I love that you made him somebody that many, many people can connect with and see their own experience reflected.
Dr. Mira Keddis: A final common pathway.
Dr. Denise Millstine: In the book Briana and Jacob are really our main characters. Jacob has profound anxiety. Briana’s had a lot of life events in the last short period of time, and they both discover this supply closet where they hide out when they’re on a busy shift.
In one of the early scenes of them in the supply closet together, Jacob makes this very flippant remark. He says: “Well, it could be worse. You can live for decades on dialysis.” This lacks empathy and understanding of how challenging chronic kidney disease is and what it means to be on dialysis. Although you can replace the kidney function by dialysis, it’s not easy. Can you talk us through how you decided that moment as well?
Abby Jimenez: Jacob actually does go on later to explain why he made that comment, which was less oblivious than it sounded in the moment. Jacob’s anxiety sometimes leads him to say things without context, or without really thinking it through. He has a hard time in social interactions, especially spontaneous ones in supply closets. But people don’t always know what to say when somebody is sick, or somebody is going through a hard time and there’s these platitudes that people use like “it could be worse,” or “It’s God’s plan” and these things are really not helpful.
That was just a moment where I wanted the reader to understand that these things aren’t helpful. Just because something could be worse doesn’t mean that what somebody is going through isn’t really awful and really sucks and should be validated.
That moment is this moment where Briana and Jacob get off on the wrong foot. Definitely in the very beginning. People just don’t always get it, and I wanted us to see that between these characters, because it’s just a tiny taste of what Briana and Benny have dealt with since the beginning of his illness, where nobody understands the depth of it, the magnitude of it, and how much it’s affected both of them in their lives.
Dr. Denise Millstine: You’re so right that we have a tendency to try to soften what’s going on for somebody, and especially in something like chronic kidney disease where the person can look, and not in Benny’s case in this scene, but the person can look completely normal and that doesn’t mean it’s not difficult and it’s not challenging to navigate all the directions and the medications. Mira, talk a little bit about the dialysis experience, what that means for somebody who gets to that point in their disease.
Dr. Mira Keddis: Dialysis is almost like a traumatic experience because it affects every facet of their life and they have to make a choice to live, but this is not a choice they’re doing willingly. They feel that they’re cornered into it because they have no other easy or quick or readily available option that would be remotely compatible with quality of life.
Even if you’re looking at a younger person or an older individual, quality is quality, which is time, and it’s not time hooked to machines around maybe a group of strangers who later on become friends for some of them. We’re talking three, four hours, three times a week. It’s definitely a traumatic event. It’s a stress and some are able to become more resilient through it, and for some of them it really breaks them.
It’s almost really a stress test of how they’re going to cope. The hardest part is not having that hope. If you’re told that you don’t have a match, if you’re told that this is your only chance or you’re not a transplant candidate, that’s a really tough place to be. To be told that you have to live this traumatic experience for the rest of your life. The hope of transplant is something that may be unique to kidney transplant versus all the other organ failures, and we’re grateful for that, but it’s not readily available.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Transplant is not readily available. Abby, this happens to Benny so Briana’s looking for a transplant, a donor. Again in a supply closet she talks to Jacob about her marketing her bumper stickers, trying to find a donor, a kidney for him, because nobody in his family is a good match and he is a difficult match as well. I really appreciate how the novel provokes the reader to think about transplant and organ donation without getting preachy at all, or hitting us over the head, but really seeing a real life situation where, essentially at that point, stranger, Jacob has in his power the potential to really completely improve Benny’s life. Talk a bit about writing that component.
Abby Jimenez: I wanted to educate the reader but do it in a way that felt very organic and didn’t feel like you were getting an info dump. I do that very gently and organically through the first part of the book. Jacob’s mother had, in the book, had lupus and had a kidney transplant when he was a kid, and he always wanted to pay it forward.
You can live your entire life with one kidney and be completely healthy. It doesn’t shorten your lifespan. You can donate the kidneys of a deceased family member. There’s so many ways that you can help somebody like Benny. When you talked about the hope, we see Benny just truly not wanting to live in this body the way that it is anymore.
Once Jacob opts to donate his kidney, the transformative nature of that hope, of knowing that in three months this isn’t going to be his life anymore, Benny is going to get his life back, it completely changes him, even though he’s still on dialysis for three months, even though nothing has changed about his condition except that the hope is there now that his life will be better and different, you are truly giving somebody’s life back when you do that.
I wanted to make sure that people walked away from this book understanding what it means to donate a kidney. Somebody actually said to me: “I was waiting for you at the end, for there to be complications with the kidney transplant. And something happens to Jacob…” I said, I don’t want to dramatize it, because the reality is, yes, it’s a surgery and it’s dangerous. All surgeries have risks, but that doesn’t usually happen. It’s usually safe for both people and I didn’t want to use that as a factor to type up that angst in the drama at the end of the book.
I wanted to depict this in a way that was realistic. Realistically people walk away from this fine and healthy. If I get even one person to donate their kidney because they read this book, and honestly, I think I probably have just based on some of the DM’s that I’ve gotten and the messages that I receive from people, this book would be a huge win for me.
Dr. Denise Millstine: That’s so powerful that, not only have you made people more aware, but have actually led to people so seriously consider being a donor. You raise an excellent point, sure, it is a big surgery, but the whole process of being evaluated for donating your kidney is rigorous and no surgeon is going to take you to the operating room if they think you’re not going to tolerate the surgery well. Mira, talk more about the different types of transplant and what you see in the transplant world.
Dr. Mira Keddis: Because it is our only hope for kidney failure, there are so many efforts to increase transplant patients. As for our peers or listeners to know the bulk of kidney transplants are from deceased organs. This is a no loss bargain. If you choose to be a donor on your driver’s license, you could give a gift to life at the time of death.
This is the most common way of transplanting patients. For the living donation we’re hoping to increase awareness, especially among minoritized groups. There are sometimes stigma and other concerns that decrease the rates of living donation for other groups, particularly among African Americans as well as Hispanics. Deceased donors or living donors. From a procedural standpoint, they’re about the same, but the wait time is drastically different.
Promoting living donation is a noble cause, and I’m excited to hear how it can inspire a movement. Probably more powerful than some of our campaigns maybe.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Well, spending time with these characters is a joy. It’s great that it also is making us think about real life decisions as well. Let’s segue to talking about mental health and kidney disease, because the overlap is enormous. Jacob, we’ve said, has significant anxiety. It affects the way he interacts with other people. It affects some of the decisions that he makes in his life.
Benny clearly has major depression, at least when we meet him at the beginning of the book. Abby, I feel like mental health makes an appearance in most of your books — actually, even not necessarily the focus. I really appreciate that because again, these are topics that can be very difficult to discuss and can be very stigmatized, and yet you do such a good job of portraying them accurately and hopefully helping your readers see themselves reflected in these characters. Can you talk about that?
Abby Jimenez: I include mental health in all my books because none of us are immune to mental health issues. None of us are. Even if you are pretty level and have not had a hard time in your life, you can lose somebody and become depressed. You can have anxiety at any time. Nobody’s immune to this.
In this book Jacob does have generalized anxiety disorder and he does have social anxiety as well. He takes medication for it. He goes to therapy for it. I very much want to de-stigmatize mental health care in my books. Briana actually says, at one point, when she’s in his apartment, or in his house and she picks up his medication for his depression and shakes the bottle and she’s like: “Oh, you’re on medication. So much better than punching holes in walls.”
We should be taking care of ourselves and our mental health. Jacob does a really good job with that. Another thing that I’ve been doing in my books is consciously removing mental health, stigmatizing words like “crazy,” “insane,” “psychopath.” Words that we just use in our daily language and vernacular because those are stigmatizing words.
I have been actively removing them from my last couple of books. It’s so important that we talk about it and that we normalize taking medication, we normalize going to therapy and normalize acknowledging when we have a problem with it.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Jacob has an incredible practice of journaling to help with his anxiety as well, which is perhaps underrecognized, not that it should be the only way that people treat an anxiety disorder, but is something that’s available to all of us. If you have paper and a pen and ideally somebody with whom you can share things that rise from that process. Mira, talk about how you see mental health overlapping with chronic kidney disease.
Dr. Mira Keddis: There’s definitely a high prevalence of depression and anxiety, particularly among patients on dialysis and more advanced chronic kidney disease stages. I do appreciate Abby’s perspective on how hard the news of having chronic kidney disease can be for a patient, even if their numbers are not, quote unquote, that bad, because I think the nephrology community at large sometimes gets so desensitized because we see such a severe spectrum, that we don’t always empathize, or name the struggle that our patients, who may have mild forms of chronic kidney disease may have, because in our minds they’re fine, they still have a ways to go.
Just having that diagnosis can be traumatic to different people. I can imagine affecting mental health in different ways depending on their other comorbidities as well as the resilience; that we see the peak of it in our dialysis population.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I think it’s important to recognize that even if there’s this overlap between chronic kidney disease and anxiety and depression, that the anxiety and depression themselves should also be treated, not just treated as part of the chronic kidney disease, but hopefully people can seek help and get the help that they need.
Abby, you’re a baker. In one of the great scenes when Briana’s talking Benny into home dialysis, he says: “Do you mean I can eat ice cream?” I hope I’m not misquoting that, but I love how you, again, with humor and lightly talked about some of the diet restrictions with kidney disease. I’m sure that’s been really important to you, even with your own journey having to restrict what you eat. Talk about that.
Abby Jimenez: Kidney disease affects you in so many different ways. Thankfully, my condition is now in full remission. I no longer have any dietary restrictions, but, when I first entered into this journey I had to change my diet. I couldn’t have high sodium. I had to be really careful about what I eat. I couldn’t have too much protein.
It really does affect you because food is such a huge part of everyday life. We celebrate with food, we socialize with food, we use food to make us feel better. That is just something like one small piece of what put Benny in the state of mind that he’s in.
When Briana pitches to him that if he does home dialysis he can probably have some more restricted foods because he’s doing it every day and he’ll feel better. He gets so excited because he gets to eat ice cream, because when you’re on dialysis, you can’t have too many liquids. You can have watermelon, you can’t have soda, you can’t have too many liquids.
That was just one small piece, at least for me, that just made this so hard. When you spoke about the levels of depression and how people feel about it and how, when you’re in the earlier stages, you don’t recognize it.
They can also have depression and anxiety. It’s the what if it’s the “what if” that gets you? Because it was the “what if” that got me. I have never felt so depressed in my life than I did when I got this diagnosis, because even though I felt physically fine, I looked physically fine, it was the “what if” that really started to tear me down. Looking ahead and thinking, what if I’m like Benny and I can’t eat my favorite foods in a few years?
What if I’m on dialysis and I can’t find a kidney transplant? What if I can’t travel anymore because it’s too hard to travel while you’re on dialysis? It’s the “what ifs” that get you. The food was a huge part of it for me because I am a baker and I do love food. That’s a huge part of my life. I definitely had to write that part into my book.
Dr. Denise Millstine: You bring up such an important point. It’s part of everybody’s life in how we operate. Not just how we feed our bodies, of course, that’s basic, but it brings so many social and joyful moments to our lives. Mira, you navigate dietary restrictions with your patients all the time. What do you find is the hardest?
Dr. Mira Keddis: It is a huge struggle, and I have to be honest, the restrictions get worse and worse as the kidney function gets lower and lower. The reality of life is we can tell them what they’re supposed to do, but we have to meet them where they are. I tell my patients: “Here, you’ve got to restrict sodium, you’ve got to restrict potassium, you’ve got to restrict phosphates, you’ve got to restrict fluid.”
A lot of times they get really frustrated, “What am I going to eat?” I say, “Let’s focus on one thing at a time. Right now your most important problem is salt. Let’s focus on salt.” And let’s take it one at a time rather than throw the whole prescriptive dietary restriction, that’s quite frankly, impractical and for some they (would rather) die and eat what they want, then to live in this restrictive life. It gets even worse when they’ve got diabetes and other comorbidities that even add an additional element of dietary restriction.
Dr. Denise Millstine: It’s an excellent point to not let perfect be the enemy of good, looking at salt, which for most people comes from their processed foods or their prepared foods as opposed to that saltshaker on their table. Okay, ladies, what do you want the listeners to take away about chronic kidney disease? Abby, what are the messages you definitely want our listeners to walk away with and then Mira, I want you to follow up on that.
Abby Jimenez: I want them to know all the things that I didn’t know when it happened to me. One, it can happen to young people. I really thought that kidney disease was an old person’s disease. I had no idea that it could happen to somebody my age at the time, and I didn’t know that it was silent. My only symptom was my hair was thinning a little bit. It was just thinning just the tiniest bit. It wasn’t like chunks of my hair were falling out in my hair brush, or I had bald spots or anything. I just was like: “I feel like my hair’s just a little thin,” but it was an election year and I thought everybody’s hair was probably falling out.
I want people to know that it can happen to anybody at any age. I want people to not ignore the small symptoms that you may have. Go get it checked out, because it’s better to get it checked out and it’s nothing than it is to ignore it and it progresses. I want people to know that you can donate a kidney and live your entire life and be healthy and save somebody else’s life in the process.
At the very least, if you’re ever in the situation where you can donate the organs of a loved one, please do, because it does change lives.
Dr. Mira Keddis: I think you nailed it out of the park, Abby. I don’t know if I can add more. If I could add one more pearl would be if you’re a high-risk individual, whether it be because you’ve had high blood pressure, diabetes or a family history of kidney disease, or even family history of autoimmune disease. In addition to having a good relationship with your doctor and having your blood work checked, make sure your urine gets checked too.
Look for the subtle changes in your urine that may be a clue whether it be a change in the color, frothy urine, more bubbles than you’re used to. Just be a bit more observant about changes in your urine because that may be an early clue that could be missed. Kidney disease is common. Wear your empathy hat, regardless of what stage of kidney disease you have. Recognize that there are a lot of dietary things that can affect your kidney in a bad way if your kidney function is compromised.
Think about what you eat. Thinking healthy choices early on are going to be a good investment for you long term, and transplant gives hope. Recognize what hope feels like to you and look for ways to share it with others.
Dr. Denise Millstine: It’s really been my pleasure today to talk about the book, “Yours Truly” by Abby Jimenez and chronic kidney disease with Abby Jimenez and Dr. Mira Keddis. Thank you both for being on the show.
Abby Jimenez: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Mira Keddis: Thank you.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Thank you for joining us to talk books and health today on “Read. Talk. Grow.” To continue the conversation and send comments, visit the show notes or email us at readtalkgrow@mayo.edu
“Read.Talk. Grow.” is a production of Mayo Clinic Press. Our producer is Lisa Speckhard Pasque and our recording engineer is Rick Andresen.
The podcast is for informational purposes only and is not designed to replace the physician’s medical assessment and judgment. Information presented is not intended as medical advice. Please contact a health care professional for medical assistance with specific questions pertaining to your own health if needed. Keep reading everyone.
