Until October 2019, Radu’s life meant visiting a dialysis clinic three days a week. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, he woke up at 4:40 in the morning. He was on his way to Bucharest, where a sophisticated machine did what his kidneys could no longer do: it filtered all the blood in his body to remove toxins. In October, Rada received a kidney transplant. He and another patient with chronic kidney failure are living almost normally today because the family of the actress from Sibiu decided to donate their organs.

Rad Pred was 30 years old, had been married for only a year and had not had time to give birth to a child, when, seemingly suddenly, he began to have diarrhea, vomiting, his feet began to swell up to his ankles, and he felt unnaturally tired for his age. “If I climbed two floors, I had to rest for five minutes to recover,” recalls Radu, now 38.

He tried to ignore the symptoms because he didn’t like doctors and the hospital was the last thing he wanted to end up with. Two weeks later, he began to worry and went to the emergency department of the district hospital in Tirgovishte, the town where he lived.

“They passed tests, an ultrasound, and the kidneys were not found on the ultrasound, as if they were not there. Finally they saw them, but they were very small. I was told that according to the tests – creatinine and urea – I should be in a coma, not on my feet. Then they sent me by ambulance to Floreasca Hospital in Bucharest.”

They did not allow him to drive in his car because, according to the doctors, he could go into cardiac arrest at any moment and require resuscitation.

Also at that time, his tests showed that his creatinine was 24, in conditions where it is up to 1.2-1.4 in a healthy person, and his urea was 400, although the norm is a maximum of 45. But Radu did not know anything then. what do all these values ​​on his blood work mean.

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