For four-year-old Lucas Ostafichuk-Bates, eating breakfast, lunch or supper involves hooking up a pump to a port on his tummy that provides nutrients directly to his stomach.
It's all the Stettler boy has ever known, and it's kept him off dialysis for the first four years of his life. No longer.
His mother, Billie-Sue Ostafichuk and his dad, Tim Bates, are preparing for the inevitable switch over to peritoneal dialysis, as their son has simply become too big for his barely functioning kidneys to handle cleaning their son's blood.
Lucas was born two months premature, a deliberate childbirth that was necessary as he was in complete renal failure. The family had been watching, anxious, since an earlier ultrasound had revealed Ostafichuk had nearly no natal fluid. Several tests later, Lucas' lack of kidney function was discovered.
“They were ready to take him at 28 weeks,” she said, near the threshold of when a child can be safely delivered premature.
While a bystander today wouldn't be able to tell Lucas from the other children he plays with, as he's active and happy, the first month and a bit of his life was spent in the NICU, being tested and probed and being fed through a tube in his nose.
“At first, they thought only one kidney didn't work,” Ostafichuk said. “But later we realized neither kidney had worked.”
While one nephrologist – a kidney specialist – wanted to start Lucas on dialysis right away, another pointed out that the kidneys will grow until Lucas is a year or two old, so there's a chance he'll develop some kidney function. In Lucas' case, that's exactly what happened.
Since Lucas isn't currently on dialysis, he's very far down on the transplant list, Ostafichuk said. Her son's rarer blood type, A-, makes it harder to find a donor. She and her husband are hoping to find a live donor since live-donor kidneys have a longer lifespan than those taken from people who have died.
Some medical issues have knocked Ostafichuk off the potential donor list and Bates isn't a match for his son. The two are hoping someone in the community might be a blood type match, the first hurdle that needs to be passed in order to be a potential donor.
Shayroz Khosla in Edmonton is the person working with Lucas' family from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Anyone interested in being tested as a potential donor and is A- blood type should give her a call at 780-407-7749, or email livingdonors@albertahealthservices.ca .