monkeynose

Oh, it's going viral all right.

No, I have 2 - I was born with only one defective one, and I got a transplant. They only transplant one. You only need about 2% of a single kidney's function to live. The two you are born with are very redundant.

According to my doctor, forever, as long as I don't start getting other health issues like diabetes and high blood pressure, pretty much until I die of other causes (most likely cancer TBH because of the immunosuppression). But my health has always been good other than the destructive effects of the medications, (I was perfectly healthy when my kidneys failed, it was just some random genetic thing).

I got my kidney transplant before my actual kidney completely failed due to living donor, so it didn't take long at all, it was pre-emptive.

All of my adult years have been with a kidney transplant, I never really got to live adult life without it, so I don't really know. The worst part of it is that basically it's like living life underwater in scuba gear - I have to take meds every single day, twice a day. I have to plan trips and pretty much everything else around it. I can't live overseas even though I have wanted to my entire life because the meds are insanely expensive, and I need bloodwork and doctor appointments at least 3 times per year. I travel overseas at least once a year for a couple weeks for my job, so I at least am able to get out every now and then.

Also, the fact that health insurance is tied to employment in the USA is absolutely criminal. In the past I have had to suffer terribly in horrible jobs just because I needed health insurance. My life literally depended on it. It prevented me from really living life the way I wanted, prevented me from taking chances doing creative and interesting alternative to holding crappy jobs all because of my reliance on health insurance. Basically I didn't get to live life the way I wanted. It's fine, but I would have lived a different life, that's one thing I'm sure of, if I didn't have health issues.

Daily I don't really have any inconveniences, although the damage to my body from the medications is sort of a philosophical inconvenience to me.

The day-to-day not feeling good side effects are mostly gone now that Gengraf has been established as the cyclosporine of choice - I think I started taking that around 2000. Before that was Neoral, and that had a lot of side effects - My skin felt tingly, physically felt a little weird - it felt "off" somehow, but now I don't really have any. Also the very low dose of prednisone also helped get rid of the side effects. Back when I was taking 20-30mg a day, it was brutal.

I think I started out taking about 20 pills a day, now I'm down to basically 10 immunosuppressant pills.

The other side effects, losing hair, permanent damage to your face (I looked like a different person within a year of my transplant - the prednisone and other drugs permanently change your face in a bad way.) chronic muscle fatigue, possible light cognitive effects of long term use of prednisone - none of that will probably ever go away. Although it is my understanding that nowadays they have an alternative to prednisone. Prednisone is the most destructive and terrible drug you can take, IMHO. 25 years on a corticosteroid is REALLY bad. But I'm sort of stuck with it because that's what I started with, and no one wants to risk switching me to whatever the current alternative is.