It was Christmas Eve, 2012. I tried to dress up for a colleague’s wedding dinner, but a terrible wave of fatigue had started setting in since noon.
With each passing hour, each step that I took became increasingly difficult. Each act of buttoning my shirt was happening in slow-motion — left hand to buttonhole, right to button; match, insert, three more to go. An inexorable amount of time later, I was driving out of my home. No more than one kilometre after, I felt a sudden urge to throw up. Something was terribly wrong. I parked to the side of the street and texted my colleague that I could not make it to her wedding.
The next person I called was my doctor. I had been diagnosed with spontaneous IgA nephropathy (Berger’s disease) three years prior. I was fit and in my 30s, my doctor and I had been trying to prolong the function of my kidney for as long as possible. He recommended that I immediately be warded to Mt Elizabeth Hospital and it was not long before I was given the news that I had suffered end-stage renal failure.
I had to be hospitalised immediately and put on dialysis where an incision was made between my second and third upper rib bone to allow a dialysis catheter to be inserted directly into my internal jugular vein, just below my neck and facing down into my heart.
This story is from the May 2020 edition of MEN 'S FOLIO Singapore.
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This story is from the May 2020 edition of MEN 'S FOLIO Singapore.
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