PHOENIX — The Fiesta Bowl Parade is back on December 17th this year and it will be a long but worth it route for one Valley woman.
Nancy Castillo will be there with a big ask... she needs a new kidney.
Every day Castillo starts the long process of getting her dialysis in her Phoenix home. Her health journey changed ten years ago.
She said she started, "…feeling like very sick, very tired, and very sleepy. And I just went to the doctor."
That’s when the doctor told her she had kidney disease. That thought had never even crossed her mind before.
"We don't know nothing about the... This, this disease,” she recounted.
But kidney disease is an issue, especially in the Latino community according to ABC15 Health Insider Dr. Shad Marvasti.
"When you do an age-adjusted and sex-adjusted prevalence of end-stage renal disease, which is the kind that results in kidney failure and the need for dialysis. That's actually almost 50 higher in the Latino community,” he explained.
Dr. Marvasti explained that kidney disease is commonly caused by uncontrolled diabetes and high blood pressure and that diet and exercise along with some medications can help.
But Castillo didn’t know this and now her mission is to make sure more people do.
"We have to inform the Hispanic people. That is that we are the most... almost the most people that we have a kidney disease,” she said.
That's part of the reason she'll be walking with Donate Life Arizona in the Fiesta Bowl parade on Saturday. She’ll be asking for someone to give her the gift of life.
"That's why I want to ask for a kidney because I want to be to have a better life. That's why this is my passion to go and go walk and to us for making...To have a better life,” she explained.
Even though it will be extremely tiring for her, she's committed to walking the route, in hopes of a Christmas miracle.
Arizonans can join the DonateLifeAZ Registry online at DonateLifeAZ.org or when they apply for or renew a driver’s license or state ID.
