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Retired ophthalmologist Merrill Oaks was enjoying an active life and spending time with his family when he started to experience symptoms of kidney failure at 77.
"All of a sudden, I gained a lot of weight and my ankles were swelling," Oaks recalls.
He went on dialysis, losing 25 pounds of water in a bid to help his kidneys recover. The next step was figuring out what caused his kidneys to malfunction so severely. Josephine Abraham, MD, a nephrologist with University of Utah Health, ordered a kidney biopsy and diagnosed a plasma cell disorder called amyloidosis.