JUST IN TIME

When chef ’s kidney disease was diagnosed, he was close to death

KTorres had gone to a clinic with flu symptoms on a Monday in January 2016. When they hadn’t subsided by the following Thursday, wife Stephanie encouraged him to return but he was reluctant, even though his head was spinning. Nevertheless, she persisted.

If Torres had waited until Sunday to return to the clinic, this story would be about his death rather than his survival.

It turned out he didn’t have the flu; his kidneys were so diseased they were working at 3 percent of normal. And now, during National Kidney Month, Torres is joining the National Kidney Foundation and others to encourage people to get regular checkups and to be aware of the risk factors for kidney disease.

Torres said the first physician he saw that January did a routine exam including a blood-pressure test and sent him home with antibiotics. Three days later, when he saw a different doctor, his blood pressure was 240 over 140.

“It was insanely high,” he said.

Physician No. 2 did an electrocardiogram, ordered a full blood panel and gave Torres blood-pressure medication, and he

returned to work as a chef at Green Valley Ranch Resort.

By Friday he was feeling a little better, but his mobile phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Realizing it was the doctor he’d seen the day before, he finally picked up — and was told he needed to get to an emergency room immediately.

“I said, ‘I’m working,’ ” he remembers. The reply: “I don’t give a (expletive) what you’re doing.”

Picking up a copy of his doctor’s report on the way to St. Rose de Lima, he handed it over as he entered the emergency room, where a triage nurse looked at him, looked at the report and said, “Wait one second.” Two doctors arrived and took him back to a bed.

“This has to be wrong,” one doctor said. But it wasn’t.

“How are you able to be at work — or even just walk around?” they asked. “You don’t understand how sick you are.”

KIDNEY

Torres, who was 45 when he was diagnosed, figures his regular gym workouts kept him strong enough to go on when his failing kidneys allowed toxins to ravage his body. But by this point he was indeed beginning to understand how sick he was.

He was told that one of the chemicals that regulate the heart was so low they were afraid he’d go into cardiac arrest. Tests followed, including a biopsy. Torres would be in the hospital 11 days and was put on dialysis before he was released.

His case may seem extreme, but it’s not.

“Unfortunately, that’s a story I hear all too frequently,” said Pier Merone, executive director of the National Kidney Foundation serving Southern California and Nevada. “Basically, we call it a silent kind of disease, because it really doesn’t present itself until the kidneys are at really low function. People have flu-like symptoms, they’re a little tired, a few aches and pains. You don’t see anything that’s terribly distinctive. That’s the problem.”

Another problem, Merone said, is that few people know the main risk factors for kidney disease, which are diabetes and hypertension, either in themselves or in their family. Torres isn’t diabetic, but his mother was; she also had kidney disease and was on dialysis.

His biopsy also indicated severe trauma to his kidneys some time in the past — he figures because of rugged outdoor activities in his youth.

Torres is now executive chef at Santa Fe Station. Kidney disease affects every aspect of his life. He gets up at 3:30 a.m. three days a week to go for dialysis, which takes three hours and 45 minutes each time. Then he goes to work.

“It’s a long day, and you feel weak, you feel dehydrated,” he said. That’s because during dialysis, fluid that’s built up in his body is drained away. He often experiences cramping, fatigue, dizziness and chills.

“It’s almost like it mimics the symptoms of dehydration,” he said.

It’s affected his diet, too, which has to be low in sodium, phosphorous and calcium; he can’t eat melons