Could You Live Without Your Kidneys?

Your Body

Your kidneys are two purplish-brown, flat, bean-shaped organs that lie on each side of your spine near your waistline. These fist-sized organs are among the most important in your body.

The kidneys' most important function is the production of urine, which carries waste materials out of your body. It is just as important for your body to be able to get rid of what it does not need as it is for it to take in what it does need. For if poisonous wastes accumulate in your body, they can cause death.

Kidneys, at the same time, help control the production of red blood cells and maintain the body's blood pressure.

A person can live with only one functioning kidney if the other is diseased or has been removed. But no one can live without both kidneys, unless he undergoes almost daily treatments on a special machine called a dialysis machine. This machine is attached to the body, and cleans the blood and removes the wastes, two of the jobs that the kidneys usually do.

If one of a person's kidneys is removed or diseased, the other may enlarge enough to carry on the work of two and permit a person to live a normal life.

Two normal kidneys contain 2 million tiny blood filters which filter 50 gallons of blood every day!

Comments

Kidney transplant

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 2009/08/10 - 10:52am.

If you have had the good fortune and Grace of God to have had a new kidney from a downer take care of it by taking all your required medicine and intaking a proper diet. I downated a kidney and unfortuantly my son which received it, did not take care of it and has now been removed from his body at only 9 years after the transplant what a waist of organ.

Good information

Submitted by darryn (not verified) on Mon, 2009/05/04 - 10:39pm.

this is modern medicine you cannot live without your kidneys unless the use of dialysis(which is a form of liquid in a machine to filter the wastes out of blood) with out the kidney the human body will die slowly in a less then a days or 2 at the most, as the wastes build up your blood gets more acidic and u start to die as almost all the cells i the body need a neutral to slightly alkaline Ph level in the blood to carry oxygen

acidic blood is neutralized by much of the oxygen absorbed from the red blood cells(RBC's) and less oxygen is travels to the cells

with the low concentrate of oxygen, you become unconscious and die slowly

I have no kidneys!

Submitted by Paul (not verified) on Tue, 2009/03/03 - 9:52am.

I recently had both kidneys removed and only require dialysis 3 times a week for 4 hours each visit. In each session i filter approx 68litres of blood. I have to take tablets for blood pressure as well as other conditions and can only drink 500ml of fluid a day as i no longer make any pee. I have a low potassium, sodium and phosphate diet. I need a transplant and was put "back on the list" today; 8 weeks after my surgery. My original kidneys were 9lbs in weight altogether and polycystic. They used to bleed a lot and get infected and were very painful most of the time so i could not get a transplant with them still inside me and i was already on dialysis, so they had to go!
So yes, you can live without kidneys, but its not straightforward or easy.