Hello kidney!

I love kidneys. I really came to love my kidneys the first time I worked in a dialysis unit. To be blunt, dialysis sucks. 3 days a week for 5 hours, you are connected up to a machine that is no where near as mobile as you own kidneys, ie, you are stuck in a chair whilst it does what your kidneys have nicely done for you for all the preceding years.  To add insult to injury, you should see the size of the needles they have to use to connect you up to the machine. And the surgery to create a fistula of an artery and vein to put said enormous needle in. And the scar tissue that builds up until you have a massive lump growing out of your arm from it. When you want to go away, you have to find another dialysis centre to attend because you can't go more than a day or 2 without your 5 hours of compulsory leisure time bonding with the dialysis machine.

Chronic kidney failure requiring dialysis in our indigenous population is something horrendous like 4 times the rate of the rest of us. And then, they are more likely to live far from the necessary services and be more concerned about accessing services that have often not been culturally appropriate. Whenever I get the chance, I tell people to look after their kidneys, because they do us amazing favours every moment of every day. Modern lifestyle illnesses such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension trash your kidneys.

 Chronic kidney failure massively reduces your quality of life. Dialysis increases your risk for nasty blood infections. And kidney failure will eventually kill you. It's particularly tragic that Aboriginal Australians suffer so much from it. Indigenous Australians suffer from massive social-economic problems that impact on their health as well as frequently having limited access to health care and facing culturally insensitive services. Low birth weight, malnutrition, challenging living conditions, high rates of infections, tobacco and alcohol use and the rapid change in diet and lifestyle resulting from dispossession and resultant modern lifestyle illnesses all increase their risk for kidney failure and it's just crap that as a society we like to blame individuals rather than looking at the social context in which this happens. Yet new diagnoses of 10 times the rate of other Australians, even higher in remote communities, are not exactly an individual problem. New diagnoses is those aged 34-55 are especially high. I'm sure you don't need me to point it out, but that's young. Really bloody young. These people are sentenced to life-with-machine and all our government wants to do is complain about the meagre support they provide to remote communities. Maybe real support could actually help cut back these horrific figures.