Health care worker Shawna Martel has a simple, life-saving request: one kidney | Local News
SHEFFIELD — On her upper left arm, Shawna Martel has a tattoo that reads Gerard, which is her son’s name, and the Japanese word for warrior.
Just below that tattoo, Martel has a patch that contains a glucose monitor for diabetes.
While she’s had type 1 diabetes since she was 5 years old, she got the tattoo in 2006, shortly after Gerard was born. When she was pregnant, she learned she had a second serious diagnosis: kidney disease. In October, Martel learned that her kidneys stopped functioning. Now, she’s living in a time bomb.
Today, Martel’s name is on a list of people needing kidney donations at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Knowing that time could run out before a kidney becomes available from a deceased donor — and that a donation from a living donor might provide a better outcome — Martel has decided not to wait.
She’s advertising her plight wherever she drives. On the back windshield of her Nissan Rogue, she’s posted white decals listing her cell phone number and the words “Kidney Needed O+ Blood.”
The message is short and to the point, a bit like Martel, who offers her health history in a matter-of-fact tone: multiple hospitalizations as a child, a lung collapse, and 14 surgeries on her eyes.
Having health problems since childhood, Martel has gotten used to being her own nurse. In addition to a port in her upper thigh and that patch on her shoulder, her newest piece of “software” is a catheter in her abdomen.
She uses that catheter three nights a week in a regimen that requires a half-hour of setup followed by a fitful five-hour doze while she undergoes peritoneal dialysis, a form of dialysis which relies on a person’s own capillaries, rather than their kidneys, to filter their blood.
Martel went on Social Security Disability Income after becoming blind in 2017, a subsidy she’s still eligible for today, although she regained her sight in 2019.
Her son was 17 when she learned of her kidney failure, but she worried she might not see him graduate from high school. He’s now 18 with one more year to go, but she’s breathing easier since he’s now an adult.
As she shared the news with her family, some offered to donate a kidney. But a match hasn’t yet been made. Others are too ill, with diabetes or kidney disease.
“You really have to have great health,” Martel said.
At 40, Martel has had plenty of time to live with an uncertain future. Her diabetes didn’t stop her from wrestling when she was in school. Type 1 diabetes has become so intrinsic to her identity that she got a tattoo on the inside of her forearm in a flowing elaborate cursive that reads “Diabetic type 1” simply because she liked it.
Though he’s never met Martel, Dr. David Henner, division chief of nephrology and medical director of the dialysis department at Berkshire Health Systems, applauds her choice to go public.
“I think it’s great,” he said. “We don’t see it too often but we certainly encourage it.”
He’s known other patients who have used lawn signs and social media posts to advertise their need for a kidney, and it’s worked in some cases.
He estimated Martel is one of about 50 residents in Berkshire County in need of a kidney transplant. The average wait time is about five years.
The National Kidney Foundation estimates that 37 million people in the United States have kidney disease, about 15 percent of the adult population. But approximately 90 percent of the people who have kidney disease don’t know they’re living with it because there are no symptoms until its late stages.
Henner said those same percentages are reflected in Berkshire County.
A blood test and a urine test are both used to detect kidney disease.
Several diseases can lead to kidney disease, including diabetes, hypertension and a set of disorders to the kidney known as glomerulonephritis. Because of genetic factors, certain groups of people are more predisposed to kidney disease.
As to making the decision to donate, Henner said most people can live normal lives on one kidney. Anyone willing to take that step would be evaluated by a separate team of doctors from a recipient’s transplant doctor, “so there’s no coercion.”
“It’s definitely a safe thing to do,” he said. “You’re helping someone prolong their life and have a lifesaving kidney.”
Martel wants potential donors to know about the paired kidney exchange program. That would put her name at the top of the list of kidney recipients if a person hoping to donate a kidney to her is incompatible, but has a successful match with another recipient.
Once a month, usually coinciding with a doctor’s appointment, Martel makes the trip from her home in Sheffield to Pittsfield to pick up tape, gauze, Q-tips with antibiotics and masks, all paid for by Medicare. Other supplies she needs such as tubing and solution for her dialysis are delivered to her house.
Since December, she’s returned to work 20 hours a week, doing direct care with four people at a group home. She takes on additional hours if she’s up to it. But she also had to take time off for one hospitalization.
“It’s been really a lifesaver that they’re just so caring,” Martel said of her employer.
She’s also in the midst of obtaining a certificate in medical billing and coding at Berkshire Community College. If she sounds busy, there’s a reason.
“The more I sit, the less my body wants to do right now,” she said.
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