Living with dialysis

I am on dialysis. Three times a week, I sit in a chair for hours while a machine does the work my kidneys can’t. I’m on the transplant list. I manage a family, a company, and a life from Tampa — in the hours between sessions. And I built MAVTG because I know exactly what happens to a person’s world when their body puts them on a schedule they never chose.

Dialysis doesn’t just tie you to a machine. It ties you to a place. A standard patient needs treatment every two to three days, at a specific center, with a specific team. Miss it, and you don’t just feel bad — you get dangerously ill. So the moment you start dialysis, an invisible fence goes up around your life. The wedding in another state. The grandchild’s birth across the country. The trip you always promised yourself. All of it quietly slips out of reach, because arranging treatment somewhere else feels impossible.

And here is what almost no one tells you: it doesn’t have to be impossible. Dialysis centers exist in nearly every city. Patients have the right to travel and be treated away from home. But the coordination — finding a chair at your destination, confirming your insurance, handling the flights and the transfers, managing the timing — is a maze most people give up on before they even start. Not because they don’t want to go. Because no one ever showed them the way.

I’ve sat in that chair and watched people around me shrink their own lives down to the size of a treatment schedule. Good people. People with family who love them and places they still dream of seeing. They stopped dreaming because the logistics beat them. That is the problem MAVTG and The Moore Foundation exist to solve — and it is a solvable problem. That’s the part that keeps me going between sessions.