Wobblycogs

If I wanted to get into diamond making what would I need to learn and how much would it cost? Asking for a friend, obviously.

From what I've read it's very rare to just develop kidney disease. The leading causes are diabetes and blood pressure (op reports having extremely high blood pressure before being admitted to hospital but doesn't say if that was the case at anytime before). After that there's a whole host of auto-immune conditions that cause kidney disease and then there's people who suffer an acute kidney injury and don't recover (acute kidney injuries often recover). Kidney disease is more of a sort of place holder diagnosis, it's used to refer to anyone with an eGFR test result of less than 60 millilitres/min. What you really need to know is what is causing the kidney disease.

There's generally no recovery as such from kidney disease because the damage is physical. The only option is a replacement kidney. Since the damage is physical there's also very little in the way of medication for a lot of people. If you have hypertension or diabetes then getting that under control will help. Likewise auto-immune diseases can often be helped with immune suppression. A healthy life style is a must though in all cases as people with kidney disease often die of heart attacks and strokes (and doctors don't know why).

On the plus side drinking alcohol isn't generally associated with kidney disease in fact you can keep drinking even when the disease is very advanced. The liver processes the alcohol the kidneys just get rid of the waste. Heavy drinking is advised against though.

If you are really worried ask your doctor for an eGFR test. It's a blood test and probably cheap as chips. To be honest though unless you've got a reason to suspect something might be wrong you're probably fine.

Your blood pressure looks like you were going for a record!

Out of interest what's your eGFR now? I'm guessing you've lost more function if you've had blood pressure that high. Other than the dialysis how do you feel health wise?

Take care and best of luck finding a donor.