Kandace Yakemchuk, a Heartland community resident and mother of two, will be lacing up her running shoes in preparation for an adventurous journey that begins tomorrow and will see her walking 100km for the annual Kidney March.
Yakemchuk is hoping to break her $5,000 fundraising goal as she walks in support of the Kidney Foundation of Canada with the struggles experienced by her own family in mind.
The annual march has raised more than $4 million for research, patient supports and advocacy since its inception in 2010.
“I’m walking in memory of my mother, Eleda Berscht, and in honour of my uncle, Brian Berscht,” she explained, recalling her late mother’s brief battle with sudden kidney failure following a heart attack in 2014, which claimed her life a mere few months following her initial surgery.
Yakemchuk now watches her uncle struggle with the complications of living with the loss of both his kidneys and nine years passing with his name still on the transplant list (there are no eligible candidates for kidney donors in the family); his quality of life is low, due to constant trips to the hospital, severe dietary restrictions and chronic pain.
“The amount of people going for dialysis blew me away … I had no idea,” she said, adding that her mother would sit quietly on dialysis three times per week and her uncle, who lives in Regina, currently undergoes hospital dialysis four times weekly.
According to the foundation, one in 10 Canadians are affected by kidney disease and it ranks highest for demand on the organ transplant list (around 75 per cent of the 4,433 Canadians on the transplant list are awaiting a kidney match).
“On December 31, there were 3,473 patients waiting for a kidney or simultaneous kidney-pancreas (SKP) transplant,” said Karen Thomas, community relations director for the Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan division of the Kidney Foundation of Alberta.
“A total of 67 patients died while waiting for a kidney transplant in 2014.”
Kidney disease often has a silent onset, where diagnosis is possible through a blood or urine test; those at the highest risk include people living with diabetes or unmanaged blood pressure or those who take non-prescription medications or painkillers.
Kidneys are included on the living donor list, joined by the liver, lung, small bowel and pancreas.
Yakemchuk said her personal goal is to build more awareness, with respect to the huge numbers of Canadians living with chronic kidney disease, many of whom lead a severely reduced quality of life and die before finding a donor match.
This year’s race begins Sept. 9 at the Millarville racetrack at 7 a.m. and finishes at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 11 at Canada Olympic Park.
Learn more at kidneymarch.ca. For a direct link to Yakemchuk’s Kidney March page, go to https://goo.gl/UZqgbV.
