Well, games aren't everything...

I thought I could talk about games, but I guess I have other things I want to talk about too. This is kind of a big one, so here goes.

As some of you know, I have kidney disease. Some people aren't really aware of how bad kidney disease is, though. I spent last week in the hospital because I had fluid in my lungs making it difficult to breathe. How do I get fluid in my lungs because of kidney disease? It's because of how important kidneys are to the body.

Imagine you lived in a house where you couldn't take the trash out. Nobody was getting the trash, so you had to stick it someplace. And it just keeps growing and growing. Eventually it's going to affect your entire house. This metaphor is still insufficient in describing just how brutal kidney disease is.

I've had pulmonary edema, congestive heart failure (mostly as a result of the edema), hypothyroidism, anemia, and severe mental instability due to the kidney disease. It throws your entire balance out of whack. Worse yet, I pretty much require a kidney transplant to survive without dialysis (its own can of worms), but despite a living donor available, my transplant team has managed to bungle that, too.

All I'm saying is, some people have the idea that kidney disease is "not that bad" compared to strokes or heart or liver disease. Get that out of your head. It sucks terribly.