Living on dialysis, waiting for a kidney

[okarol]

Living on dialysis, waiting for a kidney

Published: March 23, 2010 11:00 PM
Updated: March 24, 2010 9:31 AM

Donell Steele places large bags of clear fluid on her bed, puts on gloves and wipes down the bags.

She takes other bags from a box in one corner of her bedroom that contain sterile tubes.

One end of each tube goes into her dialysis machine, sitting on a nightstand next to her bed, and the other end attaches onto a short tube on one of the bags on her bed.

The bags are placed on a shelf under the dialysis machine and now Steele’s ready for her nightly kidney dialysis that pumps liquid into her abdomen.

This liquid collects the wastes in her body, and when drained, cleans them out in place of what her kidneys would normally do, but have stopped doing since her transplanted kidney failed last year.

This is peritoneal kidney dialysis, which Steele sets up for eight hours every night as she sleeps.

Steele has Familial Juvenile Nephronophthisis, a genetic disorder in which both kidneys fail slowly, starting from a young age. At age 15, Steele began to feel tired and developed headaches that wouldn’t go away.

Doctors found she was anemic and put her on iron supplements but after a month, nothing had changed.

Tests determined she not only had kidney disease but that her kidney function was only about 17 per cent of normal – so bad doctors could not believe she was still functioning.

Steele started doing peritoneal dialysis at home as there wasn’t any hemodialysis clinic at the hospital here at that time.

For peritoneal dialysis, the inside of the abdomen—the peritoneal cavity—is filled with a special dialysis fluid that looks like water.

This exposes blood vessels in the peritoneum to the fluid. The peritoneum functions just like the artificial membrane in a dialyzer.

Excess water and wastes pass from the blood through the peritoneum into the dialysis fluid. The fluid is then drained from the body and discarded.

Steele did dialysis for two years and then her dad donated a kidney to her in June 1997, and it lasted for 12-1/2 years before it stopped working in February 2009.

The wait for a kidney transplant can be as long as seven years, depending on blood type. Steele is Type O, which is the best blood type for a donor but not for a recipient.

A Type O donor can give to almost any recipient: Type O, A, B or AB. A Type O recipient can only get a kidney from a Type O donor.

However, a donor and recipient could have the same blood type but not be a good match because antibodies can be present in the recipient’s blood that can attack the transplanted kidney, even with medication.

A kidney from a live person matches better, will have minimal or no damage and will last longer for the recipient.

A new form of donation is paired kidney exchange, which could allow Steele’s husband to give a kidney to someone else so she can get a kidney in return.

Steele and her husband have different blood types so he cannot donate to her; but if there’s another donor/recipient pair who have the same problem, the two pairs can help each other.

In the meantime, her family has begun a support group for people to come together, make friends and help with education about kidney disease, dialysis, transplants and donation.

http://www.bclocalnews.com/bc_north/terracestandard/community/88857207.html