Waiting for the next session: The exhaustion of youth on dialysis

By Rufaida Abdullahi Hamidu

Thousands do take to the internet, turning their private grief into public spectacles just to buy another week of life. Yet, even then, the funds inevitably run dry. The vast majority of those diagnosed quietly succumb to the illness simply because they cannot afford the cost of breathing another day.

Step onto any digital space or social media timeline today, and you will encounter a hauntingly familiar tragedy: a young face, a student, a minor, or a young adult in the prime of their life, smiling in an old photograph, juxtaposed with a desperate plea for financial survival.

The narrative is almost always the same. What began as subtle fatigue, a dismissed body pain, or a sudden swelling culminates in a terrifying diagnosis: End-Stage Kidney Disease. But the disease itself is only half the terror. The real executioner is the economic impossibility of staying alive.

For generations, chronic kidney disease was mentally cataloged as an affliction of advanced age, something tied to long-term wear and tear. Today, that tragic boundary has collapsed.

An alarming number of young people are filling hospital wards and dialysis centers. Nephrologists and health advocates watch helplessly as teenagers and individuals in their twenties and thirties present with advanced renal failure. Driven by a dangerous cocktail of undiagnosed or poorly managed hypertension, self-medication trends, the unchecked overuse of certain painkillers, and toxic, unregulated herbal mixtures, young bodies are breaking down long before their time.

For those struck by the disease, the math of survival is a cruel joke against the realities of the average citizen.

Maintaining life through standard hemodialysis requires multiple sessions a week. With costs ranging anywhere from fifty thousand to nearly one hundred thousand naira per session in many private and standard centers, a patient requires hundreds of thousands of naira every single month just for basic filtration of their blood. That excludes specialized post-diagnosis medications, routine lab tests, and blood transfusions.

When stacked against local minimum wage and widespread economic hardship, these costs are completely insurmountable. Families are forced into an impossible corner: do they watch their child, sibling, or partner slip away, or do they sell everything they own, borrow endlessly, and ultimately resort to public begging on social media?

Thousands do take to the internet, turning their private grief into public spectacles just to buy another week of life. Yet, even then, the funds inevitably run dry. The vast majority of those diagnosed quietly succumb to the illness simply because they cannot afford the cost of breathing another day.

We cannot normalize a reality where youth becomes a pre-existing condition for financial abandonment.

Addressing this crisis requires more than temporary sympathy or sporadic crowdfunding. It demands aggressive public health education targeting young adults about early screening, blood pressure monitoring, and the dangers of unmonitored drug and herbal concoctions. Most importantly, it requires systemic intervention: comprehensive health insurance integration for chronic kidney care, heavily subsidized treatment centers, and a healthcare infrastructure that treats renal failure not as a luxury death sentence, but as a manageable public health priority.

Until healthcare is recognized as a fundamental right rather than a financial privilege, our youth will continue to slip through the cracks dying not because their conditions are entirely incurable, but because they simply cannot afford to live.

Rufaida Abdullahi Hamidu is a Public Affairs Analyst.