the Mark Brody Memorial Kidney Walk & Celebration

How the Mark Brody Memorial Kidney Walk & Celebration was born:  

The Mark Brody Healthy Initiatives program was established by his family with a monetary donation to the Alaska Kidney Patients Association (AKPA) to honor Mark after he passed from End Stage Renal Failure in Anchorage on May 24, 2009. To create sustainable funding for the program, the AKPA renamed the Anchorage Kidney Walk the Mark Brody Memorial Kidney Walk and committed the funds raised by the Walk to the program.

For Mark’s family, watching him grapple with his diet – lack of taste, no energy to cook, not having the money to buy ‘good’ protein on a limited budget and ultimately see him choose fast food, was heartbreaking. By providing cooking tools, dialysis friendly cookbooks, and education that shows dialysis patients that there is a direct correlation between their labs and nutrition and providing them with tools and dialysis specific recipes that make cooking easier will improve dialysis patients learning for dialysis patients to see the direct correlation between their labs and nutrition and would like the funds to be used to help dialysis patients improve their lab values. By supporting ways dialysis patients can adjust their diet and nutrition, their labs will improve, they will feel better and enjoy a healthier quality of life.

Funds raised at the walk support:  90% of Dialysis Patients in Alaska are on Medicare, not because they want to but because dialysis takes so much of their time. On a good day a patient may spend four hours at dialysis, but on a bad day it can take much, much longer. With limited income, the restrictive renal diet that dialysis patients should follow is challenging, especially the increased protein intake. The Alaska Kidney Patients Association assists Alaskan dialysis patients improve their nutritional choices with a few tools – crock pots and stick blenders – and dialysis friendly food cupboards. To date the AKPA has distributed over 225 crock pots, 50 stick blenders and opened a food cupboard for dialysis patients in Juneau.