Purple house gives Bonita a new lease on life

Purple house gives Bonita a new lease on life

Nicolas Rothwell - The Australian
January 22, 2007

PERHAPS it's the Narnia video playing in the background, or the scent of charred kangaroo tails cooking on the garden fire, or even the blood's quiet gurgle as it slips through the purifying membranes of the new machine.
Whatever the precise combination of charms that draws the Centre's growing army of Aboriginal dialysis patients to the purple house on Flynn Drive, its success and popularity are clear. Over the past two years, this modest, low-slung structure in the heart of Alice Springs has become the emblem of a little revolution in the care of kidney disease.

Patients from the Pintupi communities of the Western Desert now come here by choice for treatment, and for extended training, so they can return to their own remote country and receive dialysis at home.

Once, the only option for the growing tide of kidney patients from the desert was to move in to Alice Springs, and live full-time in the disconcerting environment of a Western town, and turn up at the public hospital's crowded renal unit for their regular spells on the machine. Now, there's a choice: and 30 of the region's 135 patients with advanced kidney disease receive their life-preserving treatments in the bush, or in this tranquil home.

"It's much better here," says 21- year-old Bonita Nangala Bush, from Papunya, youngest of the program's dialysis patients, as she lies back, her son Kamahl playing near her. A tube ferries her blood into the machine at her side, where a watery admixture strips it of impurities, before it circulates back. "It's easier here," she says, eyes on the flickering video: "I prefer to do it here." Along to lend support, and provide a family mood, are Bonita's skin-sister Josephine, her mother Glenda and an extended galaxy of relations and friends, some of them waiting their own five-hour turns on the dialysis machines.

Many things set the purple house apart. It is largely financed by the Western Desert Aboriginal communities themselves, through the auction sale of works by master artists. Its worth has been recognised by the federal Government, which helps the operation through a shared responsibility agreement. It gives dialysis patients the crucial hope that they can go back and see their homes again. And it provides a first stop-gap answer to the shocking tide of kidney disease that is spreading its tentacles throughout remote Aboriginal Australia.

"This place is their house, it's their machine," says Sarah Browne, the dynamic nurse, indeed the force of nature, who oversees the program. "You have to drag people kicking and screaming to the public hospital's renal unit - but our patients come like clockwork to the purple house."

And turning up, of course, is the key in treating kidney disease. The attendance rate in the main Alice Springs unit is about 75 per cent: but back at Kintore community in the deep desert, where the experts said dialysis would never work, the band of kidney patients trained in the purple house have a perfect 100 per cent turn-up rate. Life blooms at last as a long-term option, where before this program started, the standard choices for a desert patient were death - or the death-in-life represented by a permanent stay away from their country.

A smell of burning kangaroo flesh comes wafting in, and the nurses and relations rush out to turn the cooking tails. There's a video to change. And inside the dialysis machine's cool white box the blood, the desert's circling blood flows on.

URL: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21095966-23289,00.html