Dialysis patient: 'Your mortality is in your face'

Dialysis patient: 'Your mortality is in your face'

June 26, 2009 - 9:39 PM
BRIAN NEWSOME
THE GAZETTE

There were times Karen Kitzky considered stopping.

She knew what it would mean: Fluid backing up in her body like a capped water hose.

Everyday vitamins and minerals turning to poison in her blood.

She would swell, become lethargic and die.

There were times, in fact, when she'd skip a day. But two days later and feeling ill, she'd be back in the chair with a pair of needles in her arm for another three-hour session of dialysis.

For 16 years, dialysis has been a lifesaver for the 58-year-old Colorado Springs woman.

But the life saved is no easy one. Each week she spends three hours, three times a week, having her blood drawn from her repeatedly by a machine the size of a small refrigerator.

When it's over, the fatigue that follows is almost crippling.

She is one of more than 500,000 in the U.S. on dialysis for end-stage renal disease. The numbers are rising, likely because of correlating rises in diabetes and hypertension, the two most common factors in kidney failure.

Dialysis treatment on such a massive scale has given rise to a multi-billion dollar industry. Currently, one of the leading providers, DaVita Inc., is engaged in multiple lawsuits with kidney specialists and its competitors over market share.

But people like Kitzky are a reminder that there's more to the story than money.

Kitzky suffers from a hereditary disease called Polycystic Kidney Disease.

Kidney failure is a devastating diagnosis: ‘Suddenly you realize if you don't do this thing," she said about dialysis, "you're going to die. Your mortality is in your face."

A few weeks ago, as she was undergoing dialysis at Liberty Dialysis in northern Colorado Springs, Kitzky said she has done well with the procedure- so well, that she's not that interested in undergoing a kidney transplant.

Yet "well" on dialysis is not the same as most people think of it.

Dialysis patients must follow a restrictive diet and limit how much they drink. Without functioning kidneys, a person usually does not urinate. Potassium, sodium and phospherous build in the blood. Liquids have nowhere to go.

And although the procedure is not painful, it consumes the same amount of time as a part-time job and can leave a person unusually exhausted afterward. Some people feel so bad the day after a treatment that they feel good just one day a week.

When Kitzky worked, most recently as an executive assistant at Memorial Health System, she would do an evening dialysis session after work. By the time she got home, she'd sometimes be too exhausted to walk up the three front steps into her condo.

"There were times when I knew if I'd get out of the car I'd just pass out," she said, "and I would sleep in the car."

That demand is more than many people can take. As many as 20 percent of the people who die of end-stage renal failure do so by stopping dialysis, according to a 2005 Wall Street Journal review of government statistics.

Kitzky, who has been on dialysis longer than most patients, understands why.

"You have to build your life around the dialysis, and that's really hard to do," she said.

She had to cancel a trip to Maui a week before she was scheduled to leave when the dialysis center there said it could no longer fit her in.

But staying home and letting the depression take hold, she said, is a death sentence. Since she left her job, she's become an area governor for Toastmasters.

"I have to have something to do," she said. "If I had stayed home, I wouldn't be here."

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http://www.gazette.com/articles/dialysis-57447-kidney-disease.html