Last year, a former high school softball player from LaGrange, Lucy Wynne, donated a kidney to save her coach’s life. More recently, Athens resident Michael McLean received a kidney donation from one of his daughters that has allowed him to thrive after several previous donations failed. In another case, a Moultrie woman donated her kidney to a complete stranger because she didn’t want his kids to lose their father.
Nearly 30,000 Georgians are living with kidney failure, a 43 percent increase since 2010. And while these stories about life-saving support from friends and family are often heart-warming, there is a little-known crisis facing Georgians with kidney failure that needs more attention from our state’s representatives in Congress.
The main treatment for kidney failure besides a transplant is dialysis, which entails hooking patients up to a machine that cleans waste products out of their blood because their kidneys no longer can. Dialysis extends the life expectancy of people with kidney failure by 5-10 years on average, buying them time to receive a transplant, and even helping people live for decades longer in many cases…