Appreciate your health, comrades!

Today is May Day, which in many countries is a day off, as it is the workers' holiday. During the heady years of the Soviet Union it was the day of missile parades in the Red Square. That's all gone, though maybe Cuba or China still let the workers know in a rather festive way who's in charge of those missiles. In the US, May 1st has morphed into "Illegal Immigrant Day" which our dutifully ignorant journalists routinely forget (or intentionally omit, who knows?) to associate with its origins.

Although Thanksgiving is really the holiday I should be talking about today, I'll take May Day. The more I learn about what can go wrong with the organs, the more grateful I am for being healthy. Kidneys alone, though we have two of them, can fail in many ways. Many diseases and conditions revolving around the kidneys or ones unrelated like type II diabetes, lead to the destruction of the organs. This is called ESRD--End Stage Kidney Disease, and it usually results from chronic conditions or genetic abnormalities. Oddly enough, acute conditions are often quite reversible if properly diagnosed and treated, and in the disease lottery, you want to draw their lot and hopefully have a competent physician nearby. In any case, life without kidneys plain sucks. While you do find out that ESRD is one condition that makes you automatically eligible for Medicare, being on dialysis 3 times a week is not fun. A surgeon makes you a fistula, which is a slight rerouting of an artery into a vein (in the arm) to create a blood vessel hospitable enough for large bore needles 6 times a week. Fistula takes a while to develop, but once there, it's good for several years. Dialysis takes 4-5h per session, so you're pretty much tied to that center. And the survival rates aren't necessarily all that hot, so if you meet all the criteria, you're placed on the transplant waiting list. Transplant itself is not fun either--immunosuppresive drugs keep that kidney from getting chewed up by the immune system, but cancer will go hogwild in such a body. So here's to our kidneys, comrades!