Via: WFMZ
SOMERSET, N.J. - A headboard is just the latest do-it-yourself project for Tracey Amadi. Right now, she's happy to stay at home, since she's higher risk for COVID-19 complications. The mother of three lost her husband more than a decade ago, and immediately after, she learned she had life-threatening kidney disease.
"I knew that my kidneys were going bad, but I didn't know it got to that point," Amadi expressed.
Amadi needed dialysis to do the work her kidneys could not.
"I never saw a machine," she said. "I never knew what to expect, so as they were wheeling me into the room to do my first treatment, I just cried like a baby."
In 2013, Amadi's oldest son donated a kidney as part of a transplant chain, and Amadi received a new kidney, but two years ago, that organ began to fail. This time, Amadi had a new option. She is the first in the United States to use a new portable home-dialysis system called the Tablo. Patients are trained to use the machine, hooking themselves up through a connection in an arm vein called a fistula.
"The patient will then insert two needles into that fistula to get the blood to the machine so that it can remove excess water and clean the blood," explained Dr. Sunit Kabaria, a nephrologist at RWJBarnabas Health's Kidney and Hypertension Center in Somerset, New Jersey.
For Amadi, it eliminates several trips a week to the dialysis center. She called the Tablo her lifeline.
Read More: https://www.wfmz.com/health/health-beat/health-beat-tablo-home-kidney-dialysis/article_52ec0b2a-55f3-11eb-b3f0-2fb5b5ae075e.html
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