Patients Welcome New Digs Kmc, Sacred Heart Open $900,000 Kidney Dialysis Center

A curious swish, swish, swishing murmurs from the purplish streak on the inside of Floyd Lehman’s upper left arm.

It’s audible only when one’s ear is close. And disconcerting to all but Lehman.

That abnormal sound is his blood moving through a disfigured vessel that keeps him alive.

“It’s called a fistula,” Richard Dulebohn says from a nearby chair at Coeur d’Alene’s new red-brick kidney dialysis center.

Surgeons have grafted a vein to the side of an artery on both of these men. They use Gore-Tex to patch the graft. Within in a few months, the extra blood from the vein makes the artery swell into an easy access point for the tubes from a kidney dialysis machine.

Dulebohn’s fistula is long, undulating and disconcerting, the visual equivalent of a small-diameter snake shoved under his skin.

“Feel here,” he instructs.

There is rapid vibration. “That’s what they call the thrill,” Dulebohn says.

Both Dulebohn and Lehman have had several fistulas constructed during their years on dialysis. The others have collapsed. They are as nonchalant about those problems as a weather forecaster predicting partly cloudy skies.

Conversely, the two men were enthusiastic about Sunday’s unveiling of a bright $900,000 kidney dialysis center at Kootenai Medical Center.

Sacred Heart Medical Center of Spokane has been leasing space from KMC since 1985 to provide dialysis. But the area’s rapidly growing population has pushed the number of dialysis patients to 35 a day, said Jean Stevens, Sacred Heart’s kidney services director.

Demand is so high that Sacred Heart had to run the seven dialysis stations from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. six days a week to keep its customers’ blood clean and fluids balanced. It became more difficult to pack each shift of patients into the old, dungeonesque hall in the transitional care unit that housed dialysis central.

KMC and Sacred Heart decided to build a new dialysis facility jointly. It offers 12 dialysis stations, so all patients can be accommodated by 5 p.m. now.

The Inland Northwest Blood Center also will use part of the new building for a permanent blood donation center.

Lehman and Dulebohn got their first look Sunday at their new dialysis digs, a place where each will spend four hours a day, three days a week, exchanging all of the blood in his body four times with a machine more than 5 feet tall.

Individual television sets are anchored to the ceiling above each dialysis station.

But Dulebohn,78, doesn’t bother watching. He’s too busy trying to listen to all the audio books that the Library of Congress offers.

Discovering those books “has been the most fortunate thing that’s ever happened to me, other than my wife,” the retired architect says. “I’ve found books I never would have read.”

Dulebohn went on dialysis five years ago. Surgery to fix a disintegrating upper aorta required that his body be “shut down” for 21 minutes. His kidneys never quite came back.

Lehman is on his second bout with dialysis. His first tour ended after he got a kidney transplant.

Five years later, the transplanted kidney has failed. So the 63-year-old ham radio buff - call letters Floyd WD6BER - is back on the tubes.

He passes the four-hour sessions listening to the radio or to tapes or talking to other patients. No doubt that talk turns to tales from his days as an armored car driver.

“I was robbed only once,” he says. He recovered the $67,000 by putting a .38-caliber slug in each side of the fleeing robber’s buttocks. The robber survived.

Lehman has traded his Smith & Wesson sidearm for a pager that will notify him when another kidney is available. That transplant will free him from the machines once again.

Dulebohn has no such desires.

“They’ve got beautiful nurses here, really wonderful,” he says, firing off their names. “And even some of the guys aren’t too bad.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos