Hillary Kingsbury pushed up the sleeve of her shirt and pointed to a small mark on her arm where doctors recently connected an artery and a vein.
The procedure, which is called a fistula, was completed in case doctors need to hook Kingsbury up to a dialysis machine quickly.
“If I don’t get a donor then eventually when I’m wiped out and I can’t get out of bed … when I just don’t have the strength and I don’t want to eat because I can’t and food doesn’t appeal to me,” Kingsbury said. “At that point, they will hook me up to a renal machine.”
Humans have two bean-shaped kidneys that are about the size of a fist and are located just under the rib cage, one on each side of the spine. Together, the two kidneys filter about 120 to 150 quarts of blood in a day and work to excrete wastes and excess fluid, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Kingsbury, who lives in Harrisville, said in an interview in March that her kidneys were operating at about 15 percent of what they should be. She said the reason her kidneys aren’t healthy is due to a medication that was prescribed to her about 25 years ago that caused high blood pressure. She said it’s common that people who are experiencing kidney disease have had high blood pressure at some point in their life.
On a recent Friday, Kingsbury reported that she was feeling “fine.”
“I’m holding my own,” she said in a phone interview. “But I’m still feeling tired.”
She said in a brief interview in April that her kidneys were operating closer to 12 percent.
Kingsbury said while her kidney function is falling, it still has to dip even lower before she is placed on dialysis.
She’s hoping it doesn’t come to that though.
Kingsbury said she has been placed on a kidney donor list.
She said the names of the people on that list is confidential, but that she knows there are potential matches on it. Kingsbury said she has the rarest blood type, meaning it might be harder to find a donor.
As of December 2016, about 100,790 people were waiting for kidney transplants, according to the National Kidney Foundation. The website reads that the median wait time for a person’s first kidney transplant is about 3.6 years.
Kingsbury said she’s hoping one of the people on the list will be a match so that she doesn’t have to go on dialysis. That’s, in part, because her husband has Parkinson’s, a degenerative disease that has made basic tasks like walking difficult. She said she needs to be at home to “kind of be his coach.” Kingsbury said she devotes a lot of time to taking care of him.
She also facilitates a support group in Keene for people with Parkinson’s and their partners. If she were on dialysis, she said, it would take time away from running that program. Kingsbury said she would have to go into dialysis three days a week for four hours at a time, which would take 12 hours out of her week just for the procedure alone.
Right now, it’s a waiting game to see if any of the prospective donors are a match.
Kingsbury said she gets down when she thinks of bothering someone to give up a part of their body, or the alternative, which is receiving a deceased person’s kidney. Sometimes she gets to thinking about what their life would have been like if they had lived.
“Those are some of the things you think about,” she said.
Despite those thoughts, this is the route she wants to take.
“I feel hope,” Kingsbury said about the possibility of going through the process.
Abby Kessler can be reached at 924-7172, ext. 234 or akessler@ledgertranscript.com.