Nightly dialysis treatments leave Sarita Gangapersad coughing and lethargic in the morning. A combination of kidney failure and lupus have left the 36-year-old dependent on the support of family. She is appealing to members of the public who are willing to donate a kidney to reach out to be tested.
Lupus is a disease that occurs when your body's immune system attacks your own tissues and organs. Speaking to Newsday by phone, Gangapersad said she has had lupus since she was 15, but went into remission while still a teenager and was able to move on.
“I got married, graduated school, got a job, tried to get pregnant and then realised the lupus was affecting my health once again. And then the marriage didn’t work out because of my illness and the added stress of my job meant I had a lot of added stress in my life, and the lupus came back in full force.”
The Cumuto resident was diagnosed with renal failure at 30 and was put on daily dialysis while she looked for a compatible person for a kidney transplant.
“The dialysis, which I do every night, pulls all excess fluid out of the body, so in the morning I wake up dry and coughing. I do peritoneal dialysis, where the doctors placed a catheter in the stomach area and they give you a dialysis fluid that goes into tummy, cleanses the body from there and then pulls out the fluid afterwards.
[caption id="attachment_964289" align="alignnone" width="738"] Kidney patient Sarita Gangapersad stands next to her dialysis machine at her Cumuto home. - Angelo Marcelle[/caption]
"It’s a gentler form of dialysis, from my experience, as opposed to haemodialysis, where they insert the catheter into your neck or arm and it pulls the blood out, cleanses it and puts it back in.
"I plug into the machine at night and it runs automatically while I’m sleeping, and when I wake up in the morning it’s done and I just unplug it and that’s it. I can go ahead and do what I want to do during the course of the day without being hooked up to a machine. My family helps me with maintenance and switching of the bags, etc.”
Usually, close family members are the best donors to provide a match, and one of her siblings was compatible.
“After about five years of testing at Mt Hope, which was slowed down by covid19, we found out my brother and I were compatible.
"We went into surgery in April this year, and in the operating theatre they realised he was having an allergic reaction to one of the anaesthetics. They had to make an immediate decision to save his life and had to stop the procedure. If they had gone on, it would have been fatal for him, so they stopped everything.
"It was devastating to reach to that point and then hear we couldn’t do the transplant any more.”
Gangapersad said her brother was no longer able to donate his kidney to her.
“It puts me in a predicament where I no longer had my donation, and I need to get the kidney. It’s five years I’ve been on dialysis, and that treatment can only go so far.
"I had an infection shortly after trying to do the transplant. I don’t k
