Slowwhand is very sick

[Berzerker]

Is the heart problem stressing the kidneys so they want to fix the heart and that'll help the kidneys?

Yup, the heart is directly tied to the kidneys. I don't know if people can come back from stage 5 kidney disease but the heart is crucial. I wonder if they've come up with a dietary and supplemental approach to help 'detoxify' the kidneys. Its a filter and even if the filter can't be replaced (can kidneys be replaced?) increased blood flow should help.

[Elok]

I don't know any more than BK has said about Sloww's situation in particular, but I enjoy sperging about medical crap, so in general:

The functions of the heart and kidneys are very closely connected. While we think of the kidneys' job as "making urine," from the body's perspective it's really "regulating the volume and chemistry of the blood." Your large intestine just sucks water out of your food and dumps it into the blood, and it's the kidneys' job to make it right. They're exquisitely sensitive to even small changes in the volume of your blood. If they stop working well, you retain fluid and your electrolytes get weird, which places stress on the heart and blood vessels (because now you're hypertensive and electrolytes affect heart function). On the other side of the equation, your heart and blood vessels affect blood pressure too, and the actual filtering function of the kidneys is almost entirely passive, driven by how hard the heart pumps--this is why caffeine makes you have to pee, the rise in heart rate makes the kidneys filter more out. So either one will affect the other.

And whether it's heart or kidneys, backed up fluid will eventually ooze out into either the supportive tissue inside the lungs or, worse, into your airways, which is why I as a respiratory therapist have to know this stuff. Your organs all work together and it's easy for failures to cascade. So fixing the heart will help the kidneys, fixing the kidneys will help the heart, fixing either will help the lungs which can compensate to some extent for difficulties with either ...

[Berzerker]

My golfing buddy has COPD from smoking, he quit ~8 years ago after a heart attack. I have 2 golfing buddies and both had heart attacks 2-3 AM. I saw a utube vid and found out thats common and its virtually all behavior-based. Late night night salt, dehydration, mineral depletion as we get older.

Do you have any suggestions for copd and decreased lung capacity (I'm not too far from copd myself if I live long enough)?