Diabetic Nephropathy

Dear diary,
Today was such a terrible day! In all my days as a kidney, this has got to be the worst (even worse then when I got all filled up with all those annoyingly sharp stones last fall... those were weird.) My doctor diagnosed me with a disease called diabetic nephropathy (DN). What, you might ask, is that? Well I was asking the same question myself. It turns out diabetic nephropathy is a progressive disease of the capillaries in my glomerulii. Normally when my capillaries are healthy, they are great at sorting out exactly what I need, filtering out waste and hanging onto healthy nutrients for me to reabsorb. But sometimes, when there are too many large, clunky glucose molecules flowing through the blood vessels, those molecules bang into the capillary walls. The banging can damage the walls of blood vessels. High blood pressure also makes the damage and scarring worse. After so much damage, the blood vessel walls weaken and become leaky, letting lots of albumin filter out through the urine. Pretty soon, my capillary walls are so sclerotic that I let out lots of proteins and sugar that I should be keeping, and retaining waste that I shouldn't be.

Why does the doctor think I became nephrotic? Well, my owner is a diabetic, and the doctor told me that diabetes is a very strong indicator for diabetic nephropathy: between 30-40% of diabetics have diabetic nephropathy. Since high blood pressure is a strong cause of DN, people with hypentesion are also much more likely to get DN. That means people with both diabetes and hypertension get a double whammy! Is it too much to ask that my owner take better care of me? After all, I'm taking care of him...

Well, that's all for now. More to come later.

Yours truly,
Kidn E. Bean