UVa opens dialysis center in Altavista

ALTAVISTA — When Carl Wilson gets finished with dialysis, he’s home in 10 minutes.

But until 2008, Wilson traveled 41 miles every three days from his home near Altavista to the Uva Dialysis Center in Lynchburg. And after each four-hour treatment he was back on the road again.

“I live 11 miles south of Altavista,” Wilson said. “It was 82 miles a day.”

He doesn’t have to do that any more.

Wilson, 74, was a leader in helping draw attention to the need for a UVa Altavista Dialysis center. In 2006, he began getting signatures for a petition, ignored the people who said it wouldn’t do any good, tracked down other dialysis patients and interested non-patients, and sent the petition off to the University of Virginia, which owned the Lynchburg and Amherst facilities.

The 15-station center in downtown Altavista opened in the spring with two shifts a day, six days a week. On Monday, a third shift opens and the center will be in use from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. six days a week.

“I feel like I’m at home when I get out,” Wilson said, as he was undergoing dialysis last week. “Lynchburg is good — wonderful doctors and wonderful nurses,” he said. “I love them all. But to do this, I got to be closer to home.”

UVa Altavista Dialysis is the newest of nine UVa’s centers, said Yvonne McHorney, administrator for UVa for renal services and ambulatory care.

The interest in opening the center in Altavista was spearheaded by the Wilson’s petition, she said, and ultimately driven by the numbers of patients who needed easier access in the area surrounding the Campbell County community.

“There were a lot of patients in that area — quite a few in Lynchburg that lived in Altavista,” McHorney said. UVa also has a 45-station center in Lynchburg on Clifton Street and a smaller facility in Amherst.

The need for more dialysis centers locally follows a trend across the country as the nation’s population ages, McHorney said.

Dr. Lawrence Moffatt, nephrologist with UVa Altavista, said Central and Southwest Virginia have a high number of people with end stage renal disease — those needing kidney dialysis.

The aging population, he said, “is leading to more kidney disease being uncovered.”

In the past, having an 80-year-old on dialysis was thought to be outrageous, but it isn’t now.

“The longer we live the more likely the loss of renal function,” Moffatt said. If a person also has atherosclerosis, diabetes, high blood pressure and other disorders, plus the age-related decline, then dialysis becomes an option as that loss of function reaches a certain level.

Dialysis patients often have other problems that require specialist care and frequent hospitalization, and dialysis does not equal the blood-cleansing ability of the biological kidney, said Moffatt, who is with Lynchburg Nephrology Physicians. The group contracts with UVa to manage the Central Virginia centers.

UVa Altavista Dialysis is in an eye-catching big red brick building formerly used as offices by the Lane Company.

“We opened full,” said Kimberly Anger, R.N., administrative coordinator. Patients had been going to centers in Lynchburg and Amherst, coming not only from Altavista but also from Salem, South Boston, and as far away as a center in North Carolina.

At any one time, 15 people can undergo dialysis, each spending about four hours on the machine. Each patient uses one machine, but only one person uses the tubes and filters through which their blood flows.

The machine works silently, the transparent tubes bright with the patient’s blood — the heart of the cleansing is in a roughly foot-long cylinder dense-packed with specialized fibers that can keep blood cells in the blood while releasing toxins into the dialysis fluid.

The 15 dialysis stations are in a large open area in the second level of the building.

“The area was designed to be an openly visible area,” Anger said. “That’s really to provide for the best patient care. Anything that happens with these patients happens usually very quickly, and it’s very important to be able to visualize all your patients at the same time.

“We usually have at least five people working and staffing. One person is usually responsible for working with three patients, overall.”

Each patient sits in a comfortable lounge-style chair. Each station has a flat-screen TV and the person can be almost cocoon-like in privacy from other patients.

“I’m blessed to have a place here,” said Elaine Wray Clark, 69, who lives in Altavista and had been going to Lynchburg for treatment.

She’d leave early to be in Lynchburg by 11:45 a.m., then come off the machine around 4 to 4:30 p.m. She remembers the discomfort of the continuous travel on cold winter days.

“But I made it,” she said. And Clark was one of the signers of Wilson’s petition. “We all signed,” she said. “We had no idea it would happen.”

While she still has to go to Lynchburg for specialist care, Clark said by having dialysis in Lynchburg, “I have more time for myself, I don’t have to get up as early.”