On dialysis for 33 years

On dialysis for 33 years

Posted 1 hour ago

For more than three decades, Ken Sharp has been going to a dialysis clinic three times per week, for four-hour intervals, to keep him alive.

It’s time-consuming and frustrating — he has looked into the eyes of others beside him in the clinic and seen hopelessness.

He tears up when talking of some patients who cope by turning to alcohol.

But this 53-year-old Peterborough man says he tries to stay positive and tells others with kidney disease that if he can survive, so can they.

Sharp celebrated 33 years on dialysis yesterday, making him one of the longest surviving dialysis patients in Canada.

Sharp has also been lobbying for more than a decade for Canadian scientists to get involved in U.S. and Chinese research for a bio-artificial kidney — a device made with both natural and synthetic material that would be implanted in a patient. It’s believed this device would eliminate the need to be tethered to a dialysis machine.

Friends and colleagues, who greeted Sharp at Better Home Bakery in East City yesterday, to share some cake for the anniversary, called him “tenacious” and “inspirational.”

Former Peterborough MP Peter Adams patted Sharp on the back and recalled how he had first met Sharp, who had been collecting signatures to petition the government to get involved in bio-artificial kidney research in the late 1990s.

While sitting in a chair for dialysis treatment, Sharp would convince fellow patients to call up Adams to lobby for the research, Adams recalls.

Adams presented several petitions, full of thousands of signatures for the research, in the House of Commons.

“That was the largest number of petitions, (on a particular issue), I’d ever presented to the House of Commons,” Adams said.

While Canadian researchers have not gotten involved, Adams said he admires Sharp’s tenacity.

“I admire him because kidney dialysis is a dreadful thing and through such an awful time, he has had such good effects,” Adams said.

Former Peterborough medical officer of health Dr. Garry Humphreys also heaped praise on Sharp yesterday.

Humphreys, who was at the bakery for the anniversary, recalls getting Sharp set up with his first city-health petition for bio-artificial kidney research in 1997.

Humphreys has stayed in touch with him over the years. Humphreys says he also advocates for Canada to get involved with bio-artificial kidney research to hopefully make the current form of dialysis a thing of the past.

Humphreys said he thinks the bio-artificial kidney could be accomplished within a decade.

“It’s experimental, but you have to be experimental.... When I started medicine in 1965, if you were a kidney failure patient then renal dialysis was not available. Now we have got to go one more step forward.”

The device is expected to be tested in humans by 2017.

While Sharp has been primarily in touch with Dr. David Hume, of Michigan, who spearheaded this research, he says he has most recently been in touch with another doctor — Dr. William Fissell, a nephrologist in Cleveland. Fissell, who is working on the same research, has told Sharp he’ll send a list of potential Canadian researchers he’d like to join the project. Sharp said he’ll contact those researchers and ask them to apply for funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

He said he’ll never give up. “It’s not for me,” Sharp said. “It’s for all the dialysis patients out there.”

NOTE: With thousands of Canadians on renal dialysis, kidney patient Ken Sharp said it’s in Canada’s interest to get involved in research for a bio-artificial kidney. “It will save the government an enormous amount of money in the long run,” he said.

ebower@peterboroughexaminer.com

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