Corey B. King
2 min readApr 27, 2024

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Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

It’s About My Kidney, Nothing More, Nothing Less

It’s been a week since I received the devastating news that due to an elevated PSA, I would go from the top of the kidney transplant list to inactive in Lancaster, SC. I’m still active in Charleston, SC, but they weren’t calling me. This means I went from receiving a telephone call each time Lancaster encountered a viable kidney to them not contacting me at all. When they gave me the devastating news, they assured me that they had a team of people who would get me connected with a urologist to get an appointment scheduled.

It’s been a week. Either no such team exists, they didn’t extend them to me,, but in healthcare, you have to be your own advocate, so I called around and scheduled my own appointment on May 16th. I don’t think that I have prostate cancer. My PSA was 4.1, and the normal should be under 4, which is another reason why I’m incredibly pissed. It was .2 points from being where it should be, and they still banished me from their list. Did I mention that a PSA wasn’t in my battery of tests that I was supposed to receive that day? Did I mention that I did their complete battery of tests after being on dialysis machine for 3.5 hours, and sitting in a car for 2.5 hours, and walked nearly a mile to get to the hospital facility from the parking lot?

But ultimately, I need a kidney to improve my current health. Dialysis works on the heart; I don’t want to die of a heart attack or some other heart related ailment. So 47 year old Corey is going to play nice until I reach my ultimate goal! Twenty year old Corey would have told them where they could shove their kidney, and talked about their mother and greasy grandmother too.

I will keep you’ll updated on the mini soap opera that has become my life!

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Corey B. King
Corey B. King

Written by Corey B. King

Writer, Professor. Published my second book, I Have Some Shit to Say, memoir/essay collection in 2018! You can find me on Twitter at @coreybking