Tag: dialysis
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Dialysis
Saher LalaniToronto, Canada for Bapu He is eighty and on dialysis.Bound to machines andfrequents the hospital. He gasps while coughing.All I can do is give himwater and some tissue. He wipes his mouth, seatedupright, resting in a chair.Then, silence ensues. He points to the table.Remember the Eid feast? Foodie at heart,he must crave foodsnow not…
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My health care crisis
Yessenia GutiérrezMiami, Florida, United States “Mom, will it hurt?” These were the first words that came out of my mouth the day after my kidneys stopped working. The day after I found out that I had kidney failure and had to get a fistula in my arm for dialysis. I was very afraid because I…
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Hemodialysis treatment for schizophrenia?
Nicolas Roberto Robles Badajoz, Spain “You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did, and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.”-Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus) Jean-Baptiste Denys (1643–3 October 1704), a French physician who was the personal doctor…
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Belding Scribner and his arteriovenous Teflon shunt
Without Belding Scribner maintenance dialysis might have never happened. Although by 1960 the technology of hemodialysis had become quite advanced, and several types of dialyzers, notably the Kolff Twin Coil, had been successfully used, long-term access to the vascular system was still not available. The choice for the physician was to cut down on peripheral…
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Satoru Nakamoto
Of all the pioneers who made hemodialysis a reality, Satoru Nakamoto was the most humble and unassuming. He died in 2020 at the age of 92, almost forgotten by a generation that often takes the technical advances of dialysis for granted and rarely looks back on the people who made it possible. I had the…
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Stanley Shaldon as I knew him
Stanley Shaldon belonged to that first generation of nephrologists who made dialysis available at a time when uremia was a sentence of death. He was one of the bright young registrars whom Professor Sheila Sherlock took with her from the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith to the Royal Free Hospital to work on liver…
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Grit
Romalyn AnteWolverhampton, England My mother is right—my brother’s blood is getting dirtier. A nurse like me, she had read the result of his glomerular filtration rate, a test that measures how well the kidneys clean the blood. It had dropped below 15, an indication that his chronic renal failure was reaching its end stage. Some…
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Saul Bellow visits a dialysis unit
The Dean’s December, published in 1982, is a highly autobiographical book written by Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow.1 It is about the experiences of a university Dean and is divided into two episodes.2 The first takes place in Bucharest, where the Dean visits his mother-in-law, once a prominent but now politically disgraced party member lying…
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Nils Alwall—One of the founding fathers of nephrology
Mårten SegelmarkLund, Sweden More than two million people suffering from kidney failure are currently being kept alive by dialysis. But when Nils Alwall was a young doctor eighty years ago, medicine had little to offer to the patients with kidney diseases other than bed rest and tasteless diets, measures that only added new burdens to…
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Scarred for life
Shanda McCutcheonCalgary, Alberta, Canada Most mornings I wake and it does not seem like it happened at all. Still half asleep, I step under the cascading waters of a warm shower without even thinking about it. Life does not seem much different than it did a year ago, except that then I was embarking on…