Soon to shed dialysis? (After 34 years!)

Soon to shed dialysis?

by John Sowell

CANYONVILLE — After spending 34 years on dialysis, Jennie Sue Ives was recently placed onto a kidney transplant list.

The Riddle woman hopes that within the next 18 months to two years, she will receive a working kidney that will allow her to forego the three-times-a-week dialysis treatments to remove waste products from her blood and maintain proper levels of minerals.

“We could live more of a normal life,” Ives said of herself and her husband, Randall, pastor of Hillside Christian Church in Canyonville.

Ives suffered from rheumatic fever as a child and lost the function of her kidneys while pregnant with the couple’s first child.

Three times a week, Ives receives dialysis treatment. Unlike most patients in similar circumstances, however, she does not have to go to a treatment facility. She uses a dialysis machine at home.

She sits in a recliner and her husband assists her in hooking up to the machine and monitoring the progress. It takes about four hours at a time to go through the process and Ives is able to read, play cards or watch television while she’s waiting.

“I think you feel much better in your own surroundings,” she said.

Despite the burden of the constant treatments, Ives said she has lived a full life. She works as the secretary at the church, located on a hill on the Tiller-Trail Highway leading out of Canyonville. She also likes to fish and crab and go camping. Recently, she shot an elk while hunting near Tenmile.

“I’m not stuck at home or sick,” she said. “I live a pretty normal life.”

Having her own kidney would give more time to both Ives and her husband, who besides pastoring also works at Roseburg Forest Products’ plywood plant at Dillard.

On Thanksgiving, for example, the Ives helped serve 112 diners at a dinner held at the church and delivered additional meals to those who could not make it to the church. Afterward, they went and ministered to three families before going home and hooking up Jennie Sue to her dialysis machine.

“With me working fulltime, pastoring fulltime and nursing my wife, I’m spread pretty thin,” Randall Ives said.

Jennie Sue Ives has A positive blood. A donated kidney could come from someone with A positive or A negative blood or O. The donor and recipient must also share compatible tissue types, she said.

Despite her placement on the donor list, Ives said she would prefer that God heals her, making the transplant unnecessary.

“That’s what I’m still praying for,” she said.

• You can reach reporter John Sowell at 957-4209 or by e-mail at jsowell@nrtoday.com.

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