(click to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on April 18, 2024
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on April 21, 2024
Light overcame darkness for pioneer kidney patient Clyde Shields
By Jean Sherrard
I saw my physician father cry only once. At his retirement party, he completely choked up when speaking about a man named Clyde Shields. The admiration was not misplaced.
Neither doctor nor researcher, Shields was the world’s first-ever ongoing kidney dialysis patient, here in Seattle. His contributions helped improve and extend millions of lives.
The Northwest Kidney Centers, founded in 1962, celebrated its 62nd anniversary with a Shields-related double act. On March 14, the long-anticipated Dialysis Museum opened in Burien, and the annual Clyde Shields Award for Distinguished Service, bestowed since 1991, was given to Rich Bloch, former Centers board chair.
Before 1960, a diagnosis of end-stage renal disease had only one possible outcome — death. Existing dialysis machines offered temporary relief from accumulated toxins, but repeated use permanently destroyed blood vessels.
Then Seattle nephrologist Dr. Belding Scribner (1921-2003), agonizing over the loss of a young patient, had a “Eureka!” moment.
“I literally woke up in the middle of the night,” he recalled years later, “with the idea of how we could save these people.”
The solution? A surgically installed tube providing a loop between artery and veins might be opened and closed as needed for repeated dialysis without destroying blood vessels.
With the help of UW mechanical engineer Wayne Quinton, Scribner created the “Scribner shunt,” a U-shaped Teflon device whose non-stick surface helped to prevent blood clots.
Scribner’s first patient was Shields, a 39-year-old machinist dying of kidney failure. On March 9, 1960, the newly improvised shunt was implanted in Shields’ arm and attached to a dialysis machine.
The results were immediate and dramatic. “As the waste was filtered from my body,” Shields said, “it was just like turning on the light from the darkness.”
“We took something that was 100 percent fatal and overnight turned it into 90 percent survival,” Scribner said.
For the next 11 years, Shields underwent dialysis, which entailed three 12-hour sessions per week.
Until his death from a heart attack in 1971, Shields, a skilled machinist, served as research partner as much as patient. “Time after time,” Scribner said, Shields was “the observant patient who
put us onto a new solution.” His courage and insights proved invaluable in solving problems as they arose.
Today, Shields’ son Tom injects a personal note of gratitude for the treatment that extended his father’s life. “Those 11 extra years were so important to me,” Tom says. “If dad taught me one lesson, it’s don’t give up. Get back to work and get her done.”
WEB EXTRAS
Just a couple this time round.
And ending on a personal note – a portrait of Jean’s dad, Dr. Don Sherrard, who choked up talking about his favorite patient Clyde Shields. It’s displayed on the wall at the museum.
