THE SECOND Terrace Kidney Walk encourages people to sign up to be an organ donor and learn more to dispel the misconceptions about being a donor.
And two area residents know what it means to wait years for a new kidney.
Lizuarte Barcelos, who lives in Kitimat, waited for nearly seven years for a kidney before getting a cadaver kidney March 24, 2007.
“It’s working good but you know, in the back of my mind, there’s always the chance of it failing, This is not a cure, it is just a temporary fix,” said Barcelos, adding that he’s had a good life since getting the organ.
He was called to go for surgery when a donor was a match back in 2006, but he had an infection in his belly and couldn’t do it.
In March 2007, he got another call and went to Vancouver to get his new kidney and spent 11 weeks there.
His wait for a donor was long because he has blood Type O, which is the most difficult type to match if you need a kidney.
“You can supply a kidney to everybody but can only receive Type O,” he explained about being Type O.
“That’s why we need more donors. It’s hard, not only on the patient, on the family [too],” said Barcelos.
“My family supported me all the way through. I say my wife was my cane when I couldn’t walk. It’s hard on the system, on everybody, it’s a terrible disease to get but at the same time looking back it seems like it never happened. With the transplant, my life is, like I said, back to normal.”
While he waited for a kidney, he had no energy, and no appetite.
He would be hooked up to dialysis at night and would feel good in the morning but during the day, he would get more tired as his body would collect fluids that his failed kidneys couldn’t eliminate.
In the last year or so, he went to Vancouver for a few months hemodialysis, in which a person’s blood goes through a tube into a machine that cleans out the waste products and then puts the clean blood back into the body through a clean tube, then to Victoria for a month and when Terrace had hemodialysis, he went to the hospital here every other day for the last four months before his transplant.
Barcelos received his transplant after three people died in an accident and because they were all donors, 15 people were saved with their organs, said Barcelos.
He urges people to register to be an organ donor, noting that people can specify which organs they would like to donate.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a kidney or heart or whatever, it is saving lives. he said.
“I’ve been born again.”
Donell Steele had a kidney transplant from her dad that lasted for 12 years before failing two-and-a-half years ago.
She went on peritoneal dialysis, a system where liquid is pumped into your abdomen overnight to collect the waste products from your blood and drained out in the morning, is now trying to switch to hemodialysis, which will work better to clean out her body.
She needs to go to Vancouver for surgery to implant a catheter as the first choice of joining an artery and vein together where her blood would go out of her body into the dialysis machine and then back into the vein, didn’t work, twice.
The catheter will do the same thing through the main vein in her neck that goes to her heart.
Then she will spend six to eight weeks learning how to do hemodialysis in her home.
Steele expects to feel better on hemodialysis.
“I don’t feel the greatest at this point,” she said.
Right now, she feels nauseous and sick a lot and often doesn’t feel like eating.
“I don’t look sick. I think that’s part of why people don’t help because you don’t look sick,” she said.
“I go out and do stuff when I feel okay. If I don’t feel well, I don’t go out. People don’t see you. They only see you when you feel well.”
She’s looking forward to the kidney walk to raise awareness and bring people out.
She put together some information on transplants and learned the wait times are longer for her and others with Type O blood.
In 2010, the wait time for a kidney transplant for people with Type O blood was 77.6 months, whereas for those with Type A blood, the wait time was 40.7 months.
Since we’re up north, it takes more time to remove the organs and get them to where they’re needed.
“If people are signed up, it lessens the wait and they’re able to do it quicker,” she said about getting organs from here to where they’re needed.
Steele said if things were reversed and she had the chance to be an organ donor, she would jump at the chance.
“I have a lot of information so to me. I’d do it in a heartbeat so I think that we definitely need to get more information out there.”
People don’t seem to realize that kidney failure is a chronic illness and people can die waiting for a transplant while they’re on dialysis, she said.
“Dialysis is a way to keep you healthy enough to get a transplant. A transplant isn’t a cure,” she said.
She hopes the kidney walk can help people learn more about it, as anyone can get kidney disease, she said.
And to let people know that they can donate a kidney while they’re still alive as a living donor.
“I think people don’t realize that. That is a possibility,” she said.
Tests are done regularly on donors to ensure the health of their remaining kidney and other health issues can be caught early, likely sooner than if the person hadn’t been a donor and wasn’t getting checkups as often.
People often think a family member would be a better match but a total stranger can be just as good of a match as someone in your family, she said.
The Terrace Kidney Walk hits the trail at Furlong Bay campground Aug. 28.