By Yalemzewd Woredekal, MD 

My name is Yalem Woredekal. My friends call me Yalem. I was born in a family of nine children in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Doctors diagnosed me and two of my sisters with type 1 diabetes while we were still in grade school. My oldest sister was the first to be diagnosed with the disease. I was always with her when she took her insulin. I prepared the syringe and insulin for her before we went off to school every morning. Four years after she was diagnosed with diabetes, doctors diagnosed me and my youngest sister with diabetes. I still remember how painful the diagnosis was for my mother. She cried when we took our insulin. It was during this time I decided to become a doctor. I thought if I became a doctor, I would be able to take care of my sisters and myself, but most of all, it would stop my mother from worrying.

We continued to live like every other child in our neighborhood until one day my oldest sister got sick. Doctors told us it was kidney failure. Dialysis treatment did not exist at the time. She died a few weeks later.

My sister’s death made me even more determined to pursue my dream of becoming a doctor. I attended medical school at Addis Ababa University, School of Medicine. I graduated in 1983 and worked in a government hospital for one year. Then I came to the United States for further training. While I searched for a residency program here in the United States, I became ill. Blood tests showed advanced renal failure and I was told to start dialysis. Although I had learned about kidney disease in medical school, I never took care of patients with kidney failure. Everything was new to me. I thought my dream of being a physician would end. After the first year on dialysis, my health began to improve, so I started looking for a residency program again. Most of the residency programs did not want to take me because they were not sure whether I would be able to do the job. The rejections made me depressed and I started to doubt I would ever become a doctor.

One day a patient dialyzing next to me told me about a physician named Eli Friedman, MD. The patient told me Dr. Friedman would help me find a residency program. Immediately I wrote a letter to Dr. Friedman asking for his advice on how I could get into a residency program even though I was a dialysis patient.

He called me soon after and advised me to get a kidney transplant. Fortunately, one of my sisters offered to donate her kidney. I received a kidney transplant in September 1987. But, as they sometimes do, it failed a year later due to renal artery stenosis. I had to be placed back on hemodialysis.

As you can imagine, that time in my life was very difficult. I had a difficult time adjusting to life back on dialysis and I constantly worried about my future. I was fortunate enough to receive a cadaver kidney five months later. During that time, I joined a residency program at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, where Dr. Friedman works. In the final year of my residency program, my transplant kidney stopped functioning because of chronic rejection, but I finished my residency program while I was doing home hemodialysis three times a week.

Then I joined a fellowship program under Dr. Friedman’s guidance and became a nephrologist. The late Dr. Peter Lundin was also my mentor, colleague and fellow patient. He and I talked a lot about what it meant to be dialysis patients and nephrologists.

Currently, I do short daily dialysis. My health is good and I lead an almost "normal life." I really enjoy taking care of dialysis patients because I can share my experience with them both as a doctor and as one of them. I believe anyone with a chronic illness should know about his/her illness in detail and participate in his/her healthcare.

Yalemzewd Woredekal, MD, is a hemodialysis patient and the Medical Director of the Dialysis Unit at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, NY. Dr. Woredekal is a member of the AAKP Board of Directors and AAKP Medical Advisory Board.

This article originally appeared in the July 2007 issue of aakpRENALIFE.