BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD)– The Louisiana Department of Health said one of the top three underlying conditions related to COVID-19 deaths is chronic kidney disease.
One patient living with it hopes to raise awareness about this deadly disease.
Baton Rouge Local Frankie Shaw lived a normal life until one day she started noticing something unusual.
“One of the things I started having a metallic taste in my mouth and then urine. Those were the two basic symptoms I had. ”
Medical professionals told her she was experiencing kidney failure.
Fresenius Kidney Care Baton Rouge Home Program Manager Rutzen said, “When the kidneys start going out your blood is not going to be clean. Your body is going to swell and you can start to feel nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite.”
She started to make these changes, but it wasn’t easy.
Shaw said, “When they told me, I started and then I backed off of it and i started going back to eating what I wanted to eat.”
As time went on things grew worse until she was paralyzed.
She said, “And all of a sudden my arm went down. Then my head went down. Everything from my neck down just started to shut down. I was like what’s going on?”
Frankie said after this eye-opening experience she decided to buckle down with the help of her care team at Fresenius Kidney Care.
“That right there and all of those things made me change. I was like, you know what it’s time to get it together. From there I started to lose weight and listen to the doctor to the doctor,” said Shaw.
It’s an irreversible condition that’s fatal without dialysis or a kidney transplant.
Rutzen said, “Dialysis is a process where we clean the blood outside of the body.”
Kidney diseases can change someone’s life forever, however, Shaw hopes to be an example of how to not only live with the disease but live well.
“People like miss Frankie make it easy for people to want to do this job,” said Rutzen.
Shaw said, “Look at me now.”
For more information on kidney failure and dialysis click here.