Patients travel for dialysis | Fraser Coast News | Local News in Fraser Coast

Dialysis patient Lorraine Reid.

Jocelyn Watts

MARYBOROUGH dialysis patient Lorraine Reid feels worn out by what she's been through in the past two weeks.

She was so unwell on June 12 that she did not get on the bus that ferried her and other patients to Gympie for dialysis.

Ms Reid planned to visit a local doctor but Gympie's dialysis unit rang to tell her she must come and they would try to get a doctor to see here there.

She got her sister to drive her to Gympie and had dialysis but did not see a doctor so she went to the Maryborough Hospital emergency department when she got home and spent a couple of hours there.

“They said it might have been a bit of a chest infection but more a fluid on the lungs,” Ms Reid said.

Then in the early hours of Tuesday morning, she couldn't catch her breath and phoned the ambulance.

Ms Reid was put on oxygen in the ambulance and taken to Hervey Bay Hospital where she spent two days.

She was told that she was being taken to intensive care because that was about the only place where she could get dialysis and they brought a nurse in from a day off to perform the treatment.

“They couldn't take me to the dialysis unit because they had no room,” Ms Reid said.

Then on Tuesday this week she had another attack and was taken to Gympie by ambulance for dialysis.

“It's really bad because you don't feel like the travelling,” Ms Reid said.

“It makes you feel worse.”

She said even on the regular three-times-a-week bus trips to Gympie for dialysis, she and the other five patients usually ended up sleeping on the way down, sleeping while they were on dialysis and sleeping on the way home.

“It's very wearing on the body.”

She wants a dialysis unit at Maryborough Hospital and said although the State Government was looking into the matter, “we really need something done now to get something here”.