For dialysis patient, key is not giving up

For dialysis patient, key is not giving up
Careful routine, limitations become way of life

By Garret Mathews
Saturday, January 3, 2009

Yvonne Lee has known several dialysis patients who grew weary of being tethered to the beeping white machine.

"They just gave up. Went to the nursing home and died. I begged them to stay on. I'd say, 'Honey, that's your life. The impurities in the blood have to have somewhere to go.' I talked with one lady two days before the end. She said it just wasn't worth it any more. Sad. Very sad."

The 78-year-old Evansville woman pulls the lap blanket tighter.

"I'm not very well. The last few weeks, all I seem to want to do is rest."

She looks at the pictures of some of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren on the wall of her small apartment in the low-income housing complex.

"But I know the machine means I get to stay on this Earth. You won't hear any complaining out of me."

Lee, a widow, has been on dialysis for 16 years. Her kidneys have no function. She's never been interested in a transplant.

"I'm a strong Christian woman. I know very few people are on dialysis this long, but I believe God gave me the organs he wanted me to have in this life. I'm at peace with it. I let nothing and nobody stress me out."

Her regular schedule calls for her to report Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays to Ohio Valley Dialysis at 230 Bellemeade Ave. in Evansville. The process takes four hours and 15 minutes.

"I watch court cases and soap operas on TV while the machine is running. Usually I'm pretty comfortable, and there's not much discomfort. When they turn that machine on, you should see how fast the blood flows. Sometimes I just stare at it. The only bad thing is that I can't get up off the recliner."

Lee is limited to 48 ounces of fluid between treatments.

Learning discipline

"Sometimes it's a real hot day and you say to yourself, boy, I wish I could take a couple long drinks of water. But if I do, I know I'll just swell up.

"You learn discipline. You learn to suck on an ice cube and let that be it. You learn not to fool with salt. If there's something you're not really supposed to eat, you just take a small spoonful and be satisfied."

Her parents had 13 children. Her father, Elbert Crockett, worked at a coal mine outside Sturgis, Ky. He started when he was 12.

"There never was much money in the family," says Lee, who graduated from Lincoln High School in Evansville in 1948.

"When I was just a little girl, I started cleaning houses. I'd take in clothes and use a washboard to get the dirt out."

She worked as a domestic for as little as 40 cents an hour. Later, she was a receptionist for a bank and held a variety of positions at CAPE (Community Action Program of Evansville).

"My kidneys started to fail in 1992. I had a tendency to urinate real often. I mean, I'd get through in the restroom and start to walk out, and I'd have to go back in again. The pain in my stomach made me double up.

"I went to a doctor who told me he would try to keep me off dialysis as long as he could. When I finally went on the machine, I had to read up because I barely knew anything about the process."

Lee lives alone. She has no car and calls a cab to go to dialysis.

"I don't get out much other than the treatments unless somebody takes me to church.

"My daughter (Marcia Nance) helps, but she's got her own issues with multiple sclerosis."

She says her only income is a Social Security check. She takes more than 40 pills a day, some to control high blood pressure.

"I enjoy reading my Bible and animal books and books about travel. You just have to learn to pace yourself."

Yvonne Lee has numerous tubes in her arms, legs, shoulders and chest that have been used over the years to connect to the machine.

"The doctors leave them in unless they become infected. Your body just grows around them. Most of the time I don't feel a thing unless they start itching.

"People sometimes ask if I get depressed. They say I spend most of my time in my apartment. They say I have to depend on a machine. They say they wouldn't be able to stand it. I tell them I never get that way. Not even a little bit. I always turn to the Lord."

Dialysis demystified

According to the National Kidney Foundation, about 215,000 Americans receive dialysis. The machine functions as an artificial kidney. The blood is circulated outside the body and cleaned inside the machine before returning to the patient. The process also removes waste, salt and extra water to prevent them from building up in the body.

Since the 1960s, the procedure has been used in place of kidneys lost to disease, birth defects or injury. The federal government pays 80 percent of all dialysis costs for most patients. Private health insurance and state medical assistance also help defray expenses.

Transplant statistics

The probability of a patient surviving up to a year after a deceased-donor transplant is 94.6 percent.

The probability of a patient surviving up to a year on dialysis is 78.3 percent.

As of Dec. 21, 2007, there were 74,182 persons awaiting kidney transplants.

According to the University of Chicago Medical Center, only a few small incisions now are needed to remove a kidney. Typically, living kidney donors are out of the hospital in two days and often back to work within two weeks.

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