30 Years on Dialysis -- 'Living is what matters'Posted By GRANT LAFLECHE , STANDARD STAFF
Posted 5 hours ago
Bernice Joseph's life depends on a silent whirling machine by her bedside. For 30 years, the St. Catharines woman has watched her blood as it is drained from her body, spun through the machine and returned to her.
"It can be very tiring. It was really tiring when I first started," the 66-year-old said of her three decades of dialysis.
Three days a week, for four hours at a time, Joseph's blood is cleared of toxins and extra fluid in a dialysis machine at the Niagara Health System's Ontario Street site. It's a job the kidneys do 24 hours a day. But Joseph's don't work, so the machine has become her lifeline.
She's been living with the routine since the birth of the youngest of her three daughters.
Complications during birth caused her kidneys to fail, Joseph said. Since then, dialysis has been as much a part of her life as breathing.
"I've had two kidney transplants. Neither lasted. Both kidneys failed," she said. "It was very frustrating."
At first, Joseph's dialysis lasted six hours, four times a week. Eventually that was reduced to three hours, but recently she had to go back up to four.
She said the actual process isn't painful. But it is long and dull. There is little to do but wait. Combined with a strict diet designed to keep salt out of her system, Joseph lives a carefully regimented life.
"Some people, they cannot take it. They would rather die," Joseph said Friday morning, halfway through her dialysis treatment. "But you have to stay positive. Living is what matters. Living a good life and living with my family is important. I do it for them."
Joseph moved to Canada from Trinidad in the mid-1970s with her husband, Stephen, then a seasonal worker on a farm in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
She was working as a health-care aid full time when her kidneys failed.
http://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1771167
I Hate Dialysis Message Board
Author
