In the summer of 2008, with only two weeks left before returning home from a visiting Fulbright professorship in Japan, I made a doctor’s appointment for a checkup to take advantage of that nation’s inexpensive health care system. My only complaint was arthritic joint pain.
But the physician I saw focused on a laboratory test that came back with an unexpected and grim diagnosis: advanced kidney disease. It surprised him, too: He said he had never seen someone who displayed such health and vigor at so late a stage in the disease. Before leaving the consulting room, he implored me to see a specialist as soon as I got back to the United States.