End Stage Renal Disease—A Nephrologist’s Perspective of Two Different Circumstances as Typified by Kidney Transplantation Experience in a Nigerian Hospital Versus a Large US Medical School

Renal transplantation is the sine qua non consummate form of renal replacement therapy (RRT) for end stage renal disease (ESRD). Despite the increasing ESRD burden worldwide, developing countries continue to experience a gross lack of RRT options for its teeming citizens with ESRD. This report is a demonstration of a nephrologist’s experience and dilemma trying to make sense of the yawning disparity between RRT options, especially renal transplantation, as it applies to the citizens of the USA versus the citizens of Nigeria. The limited three-year experience of renal transplantation at Garki Hospital, located in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, which is one of the very few centers carrying out renal transplantation in Nigeria, was starkly contrasted with this author’s first-hand experience at the University of Maryland Medical School, in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, as a Nephrology Fellow between 2000 and 2002. The potential role of public-private partnership (PPP) ventures in developing countries is considered as a way to help bridge this gap. Prologue: Just the other day, in late April 2017, during weekly scheduled hemodialysis rounds at one of the Mayo Clinic Dialysis Services outpatient hemodialysis units in Northwestern Wisconsin, this author was rounding on a pleasant 76-year old Caucasian widow who had been on dialysis since June 2016 for end stage renal disease (ESRD). Her other past medical history was notable for statin-induced myopathy, dyslipidemia, hyperuricemia, and gout, as well as peripheral vascular disease with previous bilateral femoral artery bypass procedures, a left knee meniscus repair, and unilateral renal artery stenosis, which was stented in November of 2013 and re-stented again in December of 2014. During the hemodialysis rounds, she had been asked how she was doing. “Today is my last day,” she had chuckled with a broad smile. She was getting a living kidney transplant in two days’ time at Mayo Clinic, Rochester. “The donor is my 49-year old daughter!” she added with an even broader smile. “I hope all goes well,” this author had intoned. “It will. It will,” she added, with glee. This tells the whole story; for the ESRD patient on thrice weekly hemodialysis, or any other renal replacement therapy (RRT) option for that matter, the act of getting a kidney transplant is a transformative phenomenon. “It is as if being born again,” one of my patients had noted previously.