Mercy Medical Center Mount Shasta is seeking as many letters of support as possible while considering the possibility of establishing a local dialysis treatment center.
As it stands now, people in Siskiyou County who have kidney disease and need dialysis either travel south to Redding or north to Medford if they are unable to get home dialysis.
“Having a dialysis center here in Mount Shasta would save the people in the county who need treatment a lot of time, money and energy,” said Frances Pucci, whose friend Dennis O’Kubo is undergoing home dialysis. “It would be a blessing. Sometimes the wear and tear of making a trip for dialysis treatment is overwhelming. Especially when the weather is stormy. It’s a hardship under any circumstance.”
Chuck Gersdorf, executive director at Mercy Mount Shasta said he has been in contact with DaVida, a leading company in establishing dialysis centers across the USA. He said said the number of patients needed to make a dialysis center financially viable is 30.
“At this time my understanding is that there are close to 30 dialysis patients in the county,” Gersdorf said. “We need to get as many letters of support as possible to determine the next step forward. There has to be enough of a need to employ the services of a doctor that specializes in kidney disease and treatment.”
Okubo and his wife Lettie spent several months traveling from their home in Lake Shastina to the Redding Dialysis Center three times a week before deciding to try the home dialysis option.
“It’s working out, but it really cuts into our day,” Okubo said. “Both my wife and I took the dialysis training class. It took us two months and now we are both qualified to do the procedure. But it takes us five    hours three times a day. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a kidney transplant in the near future. In the meantime we’ll do what   we have to. If we had a dialysis center at Mercy it would sure make my life a whole lot easier. With a trained staff available the procedure goes a lot quicker with a whole lot less stress than when my wife and I do it.”
The National Kidney Foundation specifies that dialysis is needed when kidney function drops into the 85 percent loss range. Dialysis keeps the body in balance by doing what healthy kidneys do, removing waste, controlling blood pressure and maintaining a safe level of chemicals in the blood.
Dialysis does not serve as a cure for kidney failure and patients often require treatments for life if unable to qualify for a kidney transplant.
Dialysis was first pioneered as a treatment for kidney failure in the mid 1940s according to the National Kidney Foundation, before becoming a standard treatment in 1960 that is used around the world. The federal government pays 80 percent of all dialysis costs for most patients.