What Are The Kidneys?

Your kidneys are two organs with the shape of a bean, sitting inside your abdomen.

They look like this:

What Are The Kidneys For?

They have a very important role in your body: they clean your blood.

In order to do that, they filter your blood and get rid of anything you don’t need—like toxins and waste. Then, they eliminate them through pee.

They send that pee to your bladder, which you’ll empty when you go to the toilet.

What If I Lose A Kidney?

Without our kidneys, our blood would be full of bad staff and we would get intoxicated.

Some people may lose one of their kidneys, either from an accident or a tumor. In most cases, they will do just fine with the other one, which will work harder to make up for the lost one. However, these people have to be extra careful and make sure their healthy one is safe.

If you lose both your kidneys then you’ll need some other way to clean your blood.

There are mainly two ways to clean your blood with no kidneys:

• Dialysis: it consists of going to the hospital 3 times a week. Each time they’ll connect you to a machine. That machine will take some of your blood, clean it and give it back to your body. It will repeat that process for a couple hours, until all your blood is clean.

There is a “home version” for dialysis. It’s called peritoneal dialysis. If you choose it, you will have a catheter coming out of your belly. You will have to put in a bag of “cleaning fluid” inside the catheter and leave it there for 4-6 hours. During that time, the fluid will get all the waste from your blood. Then you take it out, dispose it and refill your catheter again with fresh solution. You have to do this several times every day.

• Kidney transplant: it means getting a healthy kidney from a donor. It can be from some friend or family member, or it can be from a dead donor. First, doctors need to make sure you are both (the donor and yourself) compatible.