Meet Dr. Priya
I know who you are. Because I was you.
You are probably the person everyone counts on. You deliver at work. You hold things together at home. Your children need you. Your parents need you. Your younger siblings are looking up to you for help, support and for guidance. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, you have been putting yourself last.
I was that woman. I was practicing medicine, caring for patients around the clock, raising my family, supporting my parents — and at 37, my own creatinine was 1.0 mg/dL. A number no one would have flagged. But I was exhausted in a way that sleep could not touch.
At the age many of you are now, I was too sick to be the mother I wanted to be — readmitted to the hospital again and again, leaning on my parents and my sisters, over and over, to care for me and for my five-year-old son.
And I was crying — not from guilt alone, but from grief. I could not fathom how my boy would carry on, so young, without me in his life. I did not want to abandon him — and I felt helpless, certain I would end up doing exactly that. Because I am a nephrologist. I knew precisely what kidney disease, dialysis, and a transplant would mean, and I was sure I would die. To know all of that, and feel it coming for you, is a particular kind of torture. Wouldn't you say?
My sister — a Harvard-trained radiologist — looked at my kidney scan and told me what she saw.
"Priya, your kidneys are shot. Your renal cortices are very badly scarred. They look like you have been on dialysis for years."
— My sister, Harvard-trained radiologist, reviewing my kidney scan at age 37 — creatinine 1.0 mg/dL, a number every other doctor considered normal.
I was thirty-seven. My son was five. And I knew what scarring like that meant: start dialysis soon — as scarred as my kidneys were — and they give you about five years. I lay awake terrified — of dialysis, of needing not one kidney transplant but several, of the possible infections, the possible cancer, and the possible rejections that can come with them — as I had seen, and helped care for. Night after night I wondered, worried, prayed and cried to God: how could this be — and was there any way out of this diagnosis?
Why was I the only sick one, when my grandparents — every one of them — lived into their mid-eighties through all kinds of illness? Why was I the one shredding my sisters and my parents, pulling attention and care away from the children of our family — my son, my niece and nephew, even my two younger sisters — when I was supposed to be everyone's rock, everyone's mountain?
That spiritual tailspin — the why me — took two years of my life. Two years of praying and meditating, of anchoring myself to faith in the great healing power of God, and my values, of letting myself accept the generous love my family was pouring over me. I meditated for understanding. For acceptance. For the energy to keep going — and, finally, for the will to start taking action: to ask whether this thing could even be reversed, and what on earth might do it.
The next steps came almost subconsciously — by what I can only call divine guidance. That is why I call what happened next accidental.
Today — at 55 — my kidney imaging looks normal.
The renal cortices on both sides — the very tissue my sister said was gone — have returned. My creatinine is now 0.7 mg/dL: a 30% improvement, eighteen years later, against the direction aging is supposed to take you.
These results are my own. This masterclass is educational and is not a clinical treatment of kidney disease. Individual results vary.