Dialysis patient sews comfortable, discreet clothing

Setting trends
Dialysis patient sews comfortable, discreet clothing

BY ELIZABETH BASSETT
March 10, 2008

Three days a week Lucy Coronado gets up at 3:30 a.m. to eat breakfast and take a shower. She and her son, Tony Coronado, get into a car and he drives her to her standing appointment, which lasts until about 10 a.m.

Lucy Coronado spends three mornings a week getting hemodialysis, a procedure that circulates the blood out of her body, cleans it, and then returns it to her body because her kidneys can’t properly clean the blood anymore. One problem of this procedure

is that access to a patient’s blood can only come from certain areas of the body, many of which aren’t necessarily readily flaunted.

From her experience and the experience of being with other dialysis patients, Coronado saw a need for comfortable,

discreet clothing. A seamstress and tailor by trade, she quickly developed outfits specifically for dialysis patients, and her growing new business, LGC Inc., may soon be able to offer clothes to men and women across the country.

“I was tired of doing the Janet Jackson thing,” said Coronado, who had a temporary access site on the right side of her chest. She had to uncover her chest and stay uncovered for hours in a cold dialysis clinic, next to other patients who have to expose various parts of their bodies by unbuttoning shirts, taking off trousers or hiking up skirts.

“You have to be in the chair to understand exposing yourself like that,” Coronado said.

Coronado, who is 74, will need to get dialysis for the rest of her life. So instead of partially undressing for treatment several times a week, she started fiddling with Velcro and zippers on shirts, making windows that would allow clinicians access to her blood while still keeping her warm and comfortable.

After some experimenting, she developed shirts that had zippers on either side of the chest and along the sleeves for upper body access and pants with zippers up near the groin and along the lower leg for different access points.

Jill Miller, a licensed clinical social worker who works at Trinity Dialysis Center, where Coronado goes for treatment, said that clinicians prefer to access a patient through the arm but that catheters in the chest or access near the groin may be necessary.

Miller said that many patients are dealing with other illnesses that contributed to the kidney failure and need for dialysis, like diabetes (the No. 1 disease that causes kidney failure) and heart problems.

“Dialysis is maybe the least of their problems,” Miller said.

Approximately 26 million Americans have chronic kidney disease, according to the National Kidney Foundation, and Miller said that because the early stages are asymptomatic, hundreds of thousands of people are probably walking around untreated when blood and urine tests could diagnose the illness.

Tony Coronado, who along with his brother, Robert Coronado, lends whatever help is needed at LGC. He said that some health care workers have seen the garments — his mother wears one of these outfits for all of her dialysis appointments — and said that even other people, like cancer patients, could benefit from the numerous access points.

“We never even thought about it. We were just doing it and people said, ‘Oh, we could use this too,’” he said.

Right now, the Coronados are working with a patent attorney to protect their designs. Once the garments are tested more rigorously, Lucy Coronado wants to ramp up production and reach patients in dialysis centers across Fort Worth, across the state and across the nation.

Developing and making the garments is not difficult for Coronado, who began sewing when she was 13 or 14, during World War II. She was able to get herself hired to help make khaki uniforms for soldiers, and then moved on to making formal dress uniforms at a store downtown. She learned how to tailor, and became a head tailor before opening her own shop off Berry Street in 1968. She retired and closed shop shortly after starting dialysis.

“I opened on a Monday, and by Saturday I had six stores I was doing alterations for,” she said.

Coronado’s children, including daughter Michelle, who does bridal alterations and has her own shop on Berry Street now, all spent time after school in her shop. Now her children are helping her again as she keeps busy with LGC.

“This is my therapy,” Coronado said. The LGC store, at 4620 Granbury Road, opens late on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but is open all day on Tuesday and Thursday.

Miller said that Coronado’s efforts with her growing business are amazing.

“In the midst of having to face this, she just kind of pulled up her boot straps and went for it,” she said.

Coronado is hoping to turn sewing into a sort of therapy for some of her fellow patients. Since she sees them several times a week for sometimes years at a time, she sees them go through the ups and downs of dealing with a chronic illness. She said that many of them become despondent because it’s hard to hold down a full-time job, but she wants to teach some the basics of sewing, alterations and fittings, so that they could find part-time work in a department store or cleaner’s and have something to focus on.

“They don’t have to be just dialysis,” she said.

Contact Bassett at ebassett@bizpress.net

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