Renal Diet Headquarters Podcast 008 - Interview with Gail Rae Garwood

Welcome to the Renal Diet Headquarters Podcast, Episode #8. We are publishing this on February 12, 2014.   Welcome to the Renal Diet Headquarters podcast with your host, Mathea Ford, CEO of Renal Diet Headquarters. This is our weekly talk about how you can succeed with a kidney diet. Brought to you by renaldiethq.com, a website whose mission is to be the most valued resource on kidney disease that people can use to improve their health. This week, I spoke with Gail Rae Garwood of www.gail-rae.com. She tells me about how devastating her diagnosis was of chronic kidney disease and what she did about it. She also shows that you can do a lot if you set your mind to it. I hope you enjoy the interview. Welcome to the Renal Diet Headquarters podcast, and this week, I am interviewing Gail, and she is going to talk to us about her journey with chronic kidney disease and how she has found an outlet for helping other people through her program called Slow it Down. So, Gail, first I wanted to ask you to tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, I am originally a New Yorker. Now I live in Arizona. I have two biological children, two stepdaughters and their significant others. I was married in April and left. I retired from college teaching, before that I taught high school for many years, and I also retired from acting in March of last year. And now I write and I am a chronic kidney disease awareness activist, which is my passion. When I was diagnosed at age 60, which was seven years ago, I didn't know what the doctor was talking about when she said she thought I had chronic kidney disease. And this is how I got the title of my book. My first question was, what is that and how do I get it? And she said, early stage chronic kidney disease. So, that's where the title came from. And she got me to an nephrologist the very next day. Now, you know, if you get to see especially the next day, there's something wrong. I went and spoke with him, and he explained, and I was so shocked that all I could think of was, he wants me to ask him questions. I think I'm going to die. I need to find out more about this. And he was really trying to tell me more about it, but I was just too shocked to hear a thing he was saying. But I've been a nonfiction writer for about 20 years, probably more by now, and that requires a lot of research. So, I started researching, and I learned more. And the more I learned, the better I felt about being stuck with this particular disease and understanding that I'm not going to die right away. I'll die like everybody else is dying and that I could slow it down and that there was so much I could do for this disease. And then I became angry when I realized that if I had been diagnosed earlier, I could have started slowing it down earlier. And that's when I made the decision that I was going to take all my research and turn it into a book and publish it and put it on for sale and talk about it everywhere I could. But then I got a call from a doctor in India who explained to me that his patients can't afford my book, even the electronic version, which is under $10. So, I talked with him a little bit, and he explained that they don't even have the money to get to the clinic half the time, they're so poor. So what we worked out is that I would start a blog, and I would publish each chapter of the book as a blog entry. He would download it, translate it, and put it in his waiting room. And then I got to thinking about other people who might not be able to afford the book. And I started working with Arizona Kidney and Hypertension Control Centers a Clinic rather and we worked out a deal where there were flyers in every single one of their offices. And then I realized that people were taking the book because I put a copy of the book in each office too.