LYNN – Glen Rodrigues’s kidneys have been malfunctioning for the last 10 years, completely failing him in October 2020.
Last year, while already having a kidney disease and undergoing dialysis treatment, Rodrigues contracted COVID. He was in a coma, had multiple strokes and open heart surgeries, and when he was discharged from the hospital and learning to walk and talk again, his mother died.
Now, Rodrigues is looking for a new kidney.
“He is definitely a fighter. He should have probably died three times,” said Krystal Patch, Rodrigues’s fiancée.
The thing Rodrigues is most passionate about is working out. He started working out when he was a teenager. It soon became his “No. 1 passion,” according to Rodrigues, and it eventually led him to opening his own gym “Disciplined Fitness,” at the corner of Summer Street and Linden Street.
Discipline was the quality that helped him not only survive a severe condition caused by untreated high blood pressure, he said, but also to make his kidneys serve him as long as possible. Rodrigues said that he had been visiting a nephrologist for the last 10 years, and that he first came to see a doctor, because he was not feeling well.
“I never went to the doctors for a lot of years,” said Rodrigues.
At his first appointment the physicians found out that Rodrigues’s blood pressure was very high, and they assumed he had this problem for years. Rodrigues learned from experience that untreated high blood pressure can cause a stroke or a terminal kidney condition.
“I wasn’t going to the doctors, and I was just walking around with high blood pressure, which 90 percent of the world’s people have no idea of what their blood pressure is, because they don’t really sense it so much,” said Rodrigues.
Born in 1971, Rodrigues was in his early 40s when he was first diagnosed with untreated high blood pressure, which means he got the condition in his 30s. His healthy lifestyle helped postpone the symptoms of the disease.
Athletic discipline was what helped him postpone the acute need of kidney transplantation for another decade. Rodrigues followed the doctors’ prescriptions to drink a gallon of water a day and to lower his proteins from 200-350 grams to 100 a day meticulously.
“My protein was anywhere from 300g to 350g of protein per day, which anybody who works out and does bodybuilding knows obviously is an average. Once I found out we had a problem, we got it down to a hundred grams of protein per day,” said Rodrigues.
Despite his disciplines, every time Rodrigues saw his physician his blood benchmarks worsened, and after his kidneys completely failed him, Rodrigues was first put on hemodialysis, and then he was transferred to peritoneal dialysis performed overnight.
“You are hooked up to a machine for eight or nine hours at nighttime,” said Rodrigues.
He was also not allowed to take showers or to swim, because he had to wear a peritoneal tube 24/7, and it saddened him, because he could not have fun at the beach last summer with his now five-year old daughter Eva Rodrigues.
And then last spring Rodriguez got COVID. He was on a ventilator “within 48 hours of being admitted to the hospital,” as Patch put it. He went into a coma, had three strokes and two open heart surgeries, lost more than 60 pounds along with his ability to walk and talk, and also had some brain damage.
“But being the person that he is and kind of living a lifestyle that he lives, he has recovered from that. He was determined to walk, determined to talk, he was determined to everything. He ended up making it,” said Patch.
Soon after Rodrigues got out of the hospital his mother died of a heart condition, and he had to learn to walk with walkers or move on a wheelchair. Now he can walk, but the feeling of tiredness and weakness prevails. Rodrigues said he felt as if he was operating at 60-70 percent of his full capacity, and he had to perform hemodialysis three times a week for four hours a day.
He is on the waiting list for the kidney transplantation because of hypertensive nephropathy causing end stage renal disease, and the wait time is three to five years. His blood type is A+, and he is looking for a donor with a positive blood type.
For more information, please contact Glen Rodrigues at [email protected].
Oksana Kotkina can be reached at [email protected].
