By Cynthia Flash
Special to The Medium
Students at Kimball Elementary on Beacon Hill know Ollie Owens as Grandma. Every afternoon and on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, the devoted crossing guard makes sure the children are safe as they cross 23rd Avenue South to get to school.
But on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, Grandma isn’t at her corner. Instead, she’s sitting in a chair with her arm connected to a dialysis machine at Northwest Kidney Centers’ clinic at 15th Avenue and Cherry Street. There, she’s known as Miss O, and she receives 4-hour dialysis treatments that remove the fluid and waste from her bloodstream because her kidneys can no longer do it. She needs the treatments to stay alive.
The new “part-time job” of dialysis came as an unwelcome surprise for Owens, 68, a former file room clerk at Swedish Medical Center. She felt well enough for everyday activities even in the years when her kidneys slowly became damaged by the silent progression of chronic kidney disease.
The Seward Park resident had been battling high blood pressure – one of the biggest causes of kidney disease – when she started losing weight fast. Her doctor checked her kidney function. “My kidneys were going out and I didn’t know,” said Owens. By summer 2013, she needed the dialysis machine’s help to do what her kidneys no longer could.
Her doctor told her chronic kidney failure would be fatal without regular dialysis or a kidney transplant. “Well, Lord, when’s it gonna be my turn? It ain’t gonna be long now,” she thought then. “But it’s been some years now and I’m still here.”
“At first dialysis is kind of depressing and hard. It takes up time. When I got used to it and saw I could still do most of what I used to, it was OK,” she said. Removing fluid from the body changes a person’s blood pressure, and that can cause side effects. “Some days is OK. Some days are really bad,” Owens said. “I get washed out after dialysis and just want to sleep, sleep, sleep. The next day I’m my old self again.”
Like other patients at Northwest Kidney Centers, Owens gets nutrition counseling from a dietitian, and she enjoys trying new ideas in the kitchen that help control her and blood pressure while she balances the special requirements of a dialysis-patient’s diet.
She still enjoys foods from her childhood home in Louisiana like kale, collards and fried chicken (now without skin). She’s learned from the dietitian about new things she likes: mango and feta cheese. “You get used to eating the same thing and you don’t think about nothing else.”
A new favorite is low-salt sweet maple sausage that she found on Northwest Kidney Centers’ website. On the kitchen counter, Ollie has a notebook full of recipes printed from online. A tomato-red stain on the recipe is a souvenir from when she tried Northwest Kidney Centers enchiladas.
“I leave salt alone,” she says, because it’s hard on the heart and kidneys. “Sometimes I wish I could just go ahead and eat anything I want. But I might get just a little taste and then it’s enough,” she said.
Dinner guests may include her 10 grandchildren, ages 8 to 25, and her two great-grandchildren, ages 1 and 3.
“I still like to go fishing. I take the grandchildren to Alki. They turn rocks over and get little crabs. We go to the park and they swing. But I don’t ride my bike with them anymore,” she said.
Owens is on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, and she’s registered with the Kidney Research Institute to participate in studies looking at health conditions like hers. “They’re doing so much for kidney patients now, it gives you hope.”
March is National Kidney Month, a time to learn the risk factors that cause chronic kidney disease, which affects more than 10 percent of American adults, many of them not aware of it yet. African Americans are about three and a half times more likely to develop chronic kidney failure than whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
While it’s common and harmful, kidney disease is treatable. Lifestyle changes and medication can delay or prevent chronic kidney failure. Here are tips to keep kidneys healthy:
- Have your kidneys checked regularly.
- Work with your doctor to monitor your blood pressure.
- If you have diabetes, control your blood sugar to keep it within normal range.
- Avoid or limit over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen and Aleve.
- Eat less salt – no more than 2,000 milligrams of sodium per day. That means paying attention to salt hidden in processed food.
- Exercise. Using your muscles can keep your kidneys healthy.
- Don’t smoke. If you smoke, quit.
If you have questions, ask your doctor or check out Northwest Kidney Centers’ website, www.nwkidney.org.
