Man,23,owes life to blood purifier
Son accustomed to Dad's 'machine'
BOTHELL, Wash. (UPI)—Joey Black, 3, doesn't quite understand it.
"Daddy's on the machine," he tells you as you enter the home of his parents.
Inside, in a hospital-clean room, his father, Joe Black, is indeed "on the machine" as he is three times each week.
It is a weird science fiction contraption of plastic tentacles pressure gauges, cellophane sheets with minute holes and a thin red line of life pulsing on its way.
Joey Jr. picks that moment to announce an emergency trip to go "potty."
"That's about the only way I can explain it to him," says his
July 21 KANSAN 3
1970
father smiling. "I tell him it's something that I can't do. That I have to use the machine instead."
Joe Black owes his life to the machine. His kidneys do not function and chronic uramic poisoning will prove fatal unless three times a week he hooks up to a kidney machine.
It is a tough regimen but one which he and his pretty wife Louise, 21, take pretty much in stride.
In essence, the kidney machine, through a complicated process called hemodialysis, purifies the waste blood which accumulates in the body of Joe Black.
"She never complains," Black said. "If she can take it, who am I to feel sorry for myself?"
Now 23, Black's kidney problems began as a 2-year-old when
he accidentally drank a home hairset product.
A slow, inexorable deterioration set in until by December of 1968 he suffered from chronic uremic poisoning and faced certain death.
Fortunately, two scientific breakthroughs enable Joe Black to lead a near normal life.
The artificial kidney itself was developed in the 1930s by a Dutch doctor, William Kolff. However, no method of repeatedly gaining access to man's circulatory system had been devised.
Dr. Belding Scribner of the nephrology department of the University of Washington Medical School in Seattle solved that problem.
In the spring of 1960, he sutured small twin plastic tubes known as cannulas to the artery
and vein of a patient dying of Bright's disease.
The tubing was closed by a small U shaped tube called a shunt. This enables part of the patient's blood to circulate outside the body until the time comes to hook up to the kidney machine.
With the shunt removed and the cannulas attached to the machine, the patient's heart pumps blood through the machine where waste products are filtered through sheets of cellophane and the blood is rewarmed and returned to the patient.
The process requires about eight hours with the patient's blood circulating through the machine and his body as much as eighteen times.
The Blacks also allow from one to two hours for "cleanup time" after each run.
Black's illness took him to the Northwest Kidney Center in nearby Seattle—established in 1962 and the world's first community kidney center.
"The people there are fantastic," he said. "They're very dedicated. You can always get help if anything goes wrong."
At the center he and his wife were interviewed by a review board, burdened with the agonizing decision of deciding which candidates can best be acented
Even today not all candidates, however worthy, can be accepted. Treatment is expensive—the initial cost for a home machine is $13,400—and not all candidates are medically or emotionally geared for kidney machine use.
"But the only way to teach you there's no way you can die" Black said. "You just don't get careless. If you die on the machine it's your own fault."
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