Gabriela Herrera

I'm Gabriela. I'm 36, I've lived with systemic lupus erythematosus since I was nine, and I do hemodialysis three times a week. But neither lupus nor dialysis define who I am. What defines me is my curiosity, my drive to live fully, and the certainty that an illness shouldn't decide how far I can go. So far I've visited 31 countries, many of them after starting dialysis, and I plan to keep adding to that list.

For most of my life, traveling was my favorite way of feeling alive: saying yes to a flight, an unfamiliar city, a new language. I never imagined I'd one day have to ask myself if I'd ever do it again. Lupus eventually affected my kidneys, and almost overnight I went from someone who barely thought about her body to someone who needed a machine just to stay alive. The woman I'd been for over thirty years didn't disappear, she just needed to find a new way to live and to travel.

What nobody tells you is that the treatment itself isn't always the hardest part. What's hardest is everything around it. The first time I tried to travel again, I spent more hours searching for an available dialysis clinic than I spent on the trip itself: phone numbers that didn't work, emails that went unanswered, clinics that didn't accept international patients, and prices I could only learn after endless phone calls. I remember sitting in an airport with several tabs open and my dialysis schedule in front of me, wondering if the woman who used to buy a ticket without a second thought was gone for good.

She wasn't. I just needed information. Once I finally found the right clinics, I went back to traveling, to working, to sharing important moments with the people I love, dialysis included. I understood something simple: the problem was never traveling, it was not knowing where to find help. That's how KidneyTrip was born, the directory I wish I'd had: real phone numbers, real emails, clinics organized by country. And for those who need more than that, a service where our team finds the clinic, confirms availability, and handles the whole process for you. I'm still on hemodialysis, I'm still traveling, and I'm still adding countries to that list of 31, because neither lupus nor dialysis define who I am. They're just part of my story.

Gabriela

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