THE KIDNEYS WANTED A BOOK

Dear Reader,

You have been asking me why my articles are in short supply of late. I retreated to work on my first book. I am happy to inform you that I am now a published author of ‘Understanding Kidney Disease in Kenya’, a small book which is available as an e-book on Amazon Kindle. This book is my giving back to the community that shaped the renal nurse I have become.

I am a word seamstress. I see words lying by the street, I see words floating mid-air yearning to be make sentences of irrefutable, sometimes jocular meaning. I take them and stitch them with other words to form hems and fashion fabrics of meaning and concepts. I use words to process the world around me. Just like a seamstress, not writing makes my fingers numb. I therefore retreated to bring words together and form my small gift of love to the renal patients I was so blessed to nurse while working in Kenya.

This book has been a huge step into the land of unknown. It has pushed me out of my comfort zone. It has opened my eyes to what is possible as a nurse with a pen. It has rekindled one of my childhood dreams of working in the communication industry. Publishing this book has felt like a debt that I have finally underwritten in blood and tears. The transformation from several posts on Facebook as a micro blogger into my first book has been as sudden as it has been beautiful. I still marvel when I look back at the far I have come as a budding writer.

Writing this book was an attempt to create relatable educational aids about kidney failure for the African patient and public at large. You will bear me witness that almost all the teaching aids we use as the medical community come from the Western world. I experienced this myself when I was undergoing radiotherapy for breast cancer somewhere in Edinburgh, Scotland. The radiologist told me that one of the side effects of radiotherapy would be pink discoloration of my skin. I am black. My skin can never turn pink. She was just repeating what she had read which was unfortunately only tailored to Caucasian patients.

When I worked in Kenya, there was little relatable and local teaching materials for our dialysis patients. It seemed that everything I told my patients was straight from the books I had read which were based in the West. ‘Understanding Kidney Disease in Kenya,’ bridges that gap and introduces the public to simple, practical knowledge on kidney disease.

?We cannot complain that patients do not comply with our instructions while we do not share with them what we know in a language they too can understand.

One of the things I enjoy doing is teaching. I love breaking down complex medical topics into small bits which lay people can comprehend. I use my social media platforms to do this. Writing and publishing this book is taking my passion for teaching to the next logical step. I love empowering patients and the public at large. I love letting people know that they have a say and a role to play in their own health and wellbeing. One of the most misunderstood concepts is kidney disease and I feel privileged that I have a chance to change this.

Though written for my motherland Kenya, this book is useful to everyone who is keen to understand kidney disease in a simple language. Being a small book, you can read it in one sitting. Being on Amazon Kindle, you can take screenshots and send to your family members. The paperback will be available in a few days for those of you who prefer physical copies.

Thank you, dear reader, for believing in my pen.

Sincerely,

The Nurse with a Pen.

?