The beeping of old dialysis machines at the National Kidney Center in Kathmandu never stops. Nurses in dark blue scrubs rush around tending to the 55 people having their blood cleaned at any given time while cleaners squeeze by carrying stained sheets and buckets of bloody catheters. The facility, located alongside a major thoroughfare in the Nepalese capital, runs three dialysis sittings daily. That’s as many as 165 patients every day. Most visit three times a week, and will do so for the rest of their lives. “Otherwise they will die,” said Dr. Rishi Kumar Kafle, the nephrologist who founded the clinic 28 years ago.
Each patient sits snuggled in a blanket, one arm connected to a device the size of a small refrigerator that filters toxins from their blood, an essential task their kidneys can no longer perform. One of them is 30-year-old Surendra Tamang, who, like many young Nepalese men, left his family to work in the Persian Gulf.
