Oct 16, 2026 · 21 min · 13 segments
Your kidneys can lose a huge amount of their working capacity before you ever feel anything wrong, which is exactly why kidney problems tend to get missed until they are much further along. In this…
So your kidneys are two organs.
Most people have two of them.
Each of them are about the size of your fist, sitting either side of your spine, under the back of your ribs.
And their job is to clear the harmful waste out of your blood while also regulating a huge amount of other things, including your blood pressure.
and your fluid balance in your body and your salt and potassium levels and the signal that tells your body to make more red blood cells and the vitamin D that keeps your bones really strong.
Now the filtering works by pushing blood against a very fine mesh under quite a high pressure so that water and salt and waste those can squeeze through the filter into a system of tubes while your blood cells and larger proteins are too big to pass through so those stay in your blood now The reason this can go wrong without you noticing is that each kidney is made up of around a million tiny filtering units, microscopically small, and these are called nephrons.
So you have roughly 2 million of these, far more than you actually strictly need.
Now, when some of these stop working properly, the rest of those nephrons simply take on more of the load, you know, the workload.
And the total amount of filtering carries on looking normal.
To try and sort of get this in your head, think of a workplace like a factory where a few people leave, but then everybody else picks up a few extra shifts.
So the amount of work that gets done is still the same.
And from the outside, nobody really notices that anything has gone wrong.
And the thing is, your kidneys can carry on doing that for years and years.
So your kidneys are two organs.
Most people have two of them.
Each of them are about the size of your fist, sitting either side of your spine, under the back of your ribs.
And their job is to clear the harmful waste out of your blood while also regulating a huge amount of other things, including your blood pressure.
and your fluid balance in your body and your salt and potassium levels and the signal that tells your body to make more red blood cells and the vitamin D that keeps your bones really strong.
Now the filtering works by pushing blood against a very fine mesh under quite a high pressure so that water and salt and waste those can squeeze through the filter into a system of tubes while your blood cells and larger proteins are too big to pass through so those stay in your blood now The reason this can go wrong without you noticing is that each kidney is made up of around a million tiny filtering units, microscopically small, and these are called nephrons.
So you have roughly 2 million of these, far more than you actually strictly need.
Now, when some of these stop working properly, the rest of those nephrons simply take on more of the load, you know, the workload.
And the total amount of filtering carries on looking normal.
To try and sort of get this in your head, think of a workplace like a factory where a few people leave, but then everybody else picks up a few extra shifts.
So the amount of work that gets done is still the same.
And from the outside, nobody really notices that anything has gone wrong.
And the thing is, your kidneys can carry on doing that for years and years.
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