Travelling can be a logistical nightmare at the best of times. Imagine trying to do it when you need dialysis three times a week.

That’s the predicament faced by many people with kidney disease including Lakes Entrance woman Susan Brown, who spends four hours a day, three times a week at the Dialysis Unit at Bairnsdale Regional Health Service, and travels up to an hour each way to get there.

Susan, 75, said she and her husband travelled often until a sudden auto-immune disease destroyed her kidneys in 2021. She had been dialysis dependent ever since.

“I started feeling a bit off, then really sick. Within two weeks, it depleted my kidneys and in a month it started on my lungs. They stopped the lung damage in time, but the kidneys were gone,” she said.

Susan will participate in Kidney Health Australia’s Red Socks Run fundraiser in October along with staff and dialysis patients at BRHS, who are competing once again as the BRHS Kidney Beanz.

Each member of the team will cover 60km in the month of October – about 2km a day – to represent the average 60 hours a month people with advanced kidney disease spend on dialysis.

The Red Socks Run supports kidney disease research and Kidney Health Australia initiatives like Transplant House, accommodation for transplant patients, their carers and loved ones in Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne during transplant treatment.

It also supports KHA’s Big Red Kidney Bus, which operate in Victoria and NSW, and give dialysis patients a chance to get away for a holiday break and maintain their treatment.

Each bus has dialysis chairs for people with kidney disease. They travel to different locations in big cities or regional areas. Kidney Health Australia advises patients where the buses will be.

For a keen traveller like Susan, the Big Red Kidney Bus is a welcome relief from staying close to home for dialysis.

“We managed to get to Mildura this year for two weeks, and that’s the first time that I have been away from home (since starting dialysis),” Susan said.

“We used to travel every year, for four or five months a year we’d go north. I can’t do that anymore because of the dialysis, but as long as we’re two days’ drive from the Big Red Kidney Bus, we can get there.”

In Mildura, Susan and Kevin enjoyed a paddlesteamer cruise and visited the Mungo National Park and toured the Sunraysia region – with the bus close by for dialysis.

“The staff in the Dialysis Unit in Bairnsdale are just magnificent. You honestly couldn’t get any better,” she said. “But the nurses in the Big Red Kidney Bus are just like the mob in Bairnsdale. They’re very, very good. They really cared and they were really good.”

The Big Red Kidney Bus is visiting Lakes Entrance in October, giving others the chance to experience East Gippsland and Susan dialysis care very close to home.

““I’ve got five weeks of dialysis in Lakes Entrance. That will save me about two hours a day while it’s here. It’s a two-minute drive instead of an hour each way,” she said.

Support the Kidney Beanz

The BRHS Kidney Beanz hope to raise $5000 in the Red Socks Run. There are two ways that you can support the Red Socks Run.

You can donate directly to the BRHS Kidney Beanz here. https://fundraise.kidney.org.au/fundraisers/BRHSKidneyBeanz

Or, you can go to the Kidney Health Australia Red Socks Run website: https://fundraise.kidney.org.au/.