Dialysis patient thankful to God

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Dialysis patient thankful to God

By Charlie Smith
News Editor
Monday, January 11, 2010 11:54 AM CST

Roy Bowen lost his sight two decades ago after a lifetime of eye problems.

And for the past 23 years, he’s been on dialysis — three days per week, four hours per day, no breaks.

So on the surface, the Itta Bena resident shouldn’t have a lot to keep him upbeat.

But Bowen, a stout 52-year-old former high school football standout, has somehow found a remarkable source of optimism. He attributes it all to the grace of God.

“Everything I do, I give it to him,” Bowen said Friday as blood flowed red through plastic tubes connecting his right arm to a machine that drains most of the blood out of his body to purify it. The device does the job his failed kidneys cannot.

The average American dialysis patient is expected to live about six years, according to the U.S. Renal Data System.

Bowen has made it almost four times as long and is going strong.

His daughter, Maxine, believes her father’s positive attitude has a lot to do with his longevity.

“I guess that’s what keeps him on it so long because he’s witnessed a lot of his friends die on dialysis,” she said.

When Bowen began dialysis in 1987, his attitude was different, he says.

“It was hard at first because I really didn’t accept it,” he said.

He weighed 400 pounds then. Doctors were only able to ascertain that figure by putting him on a meat scale in the kitchen at University Medical Center in Jackson.

High blood pressure caused his kidneys to fail. He had medicine for the condition but didn’t take it regularly.

Bowen, who was born with cataracts, was working at Royal Maid Association for the Blind in Hazlehurst. When nurses there took all of the employees for medical checkups, he remembers needling others, saying they were in trouble. The joke, it turned out, was on him.

“(The nurse) said, ‘Mr. Bowen, you’ve got renal failure.’ I didn’t know what that was. I was too scared, too stupid to ask.”

Eventually Bowen learned from relatives it was the same thing as kidney failure.

Even though his kidneys were functioning at only 20 percent, he had never noticed any problems. Once their capacity dropped to 10 percent, he had to start dialysis.

He continued working in Hazlehurst, taking the graveyard shift. Someone from the company would take him to dialysis after he got off work.

In 1989, a detached retina cost Bowen his remaining eye. He looks at it as being blessed to get 12 more years of eyesight after a doctor first told him the eye was in trouble.

Bowen is an Indianola native. His ex-wife was from Itta Bena, and that’s how he ended up there. He lives alone, but his daughter said his family does a lot to help him out.

His brother, Edward Bowen, pastor of New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in Itta Bena, picks him up for church every Sunday. His sister-in-law calls during the week and goes over Bible lessons with him. Bowen is the proud grandfather of three.

He exercises two or three times per day, doing push-ups and sit-ups and jogging in place at home. He’s down from 400 pounds to 220, and his waist size has shrunk from a size 56 to a 34.

Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a MedStat van picks him up at his home and takes him to Fresenius Medical Care on Tallahatchie Street in Greenwood.

In a large open room, Bowen takes his treatments along with at least 20 other patients. Each station in the dialysis unit is equipped with a small TV, and Bowen passes the time from 7 to 11 a.m. listening to shows through headphones and sleeping.

Before and after that routine, he takes time to remember what’s truly important.

“I pray when I come in, and pray when I leave,” he said.

http://www.gwcommonwealth.com/articles/2010/01/11/news/top_stories/01112010news1.txt