First few Article Sentences
In 1984, a California man perished in a car accident en route from rural Sonora to a dialysis center in Modesto, more than 50 miles away. It was a trip he made several times a week because he required routine treatment for End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) and there were no dialysis centers closer to home. The following year, a small not-for-profit dialysis center opened its doors in Sonora with the aim of helping to prevent this kind of tragedy from occurring again. Today, the center serves 54 patients and has a record-long waiting list of 11. Those 11 individuals have the option of making that same costly and time-consuming trip to one of a handful of modern centers in Oakdale and Modesto; undertaking home hemodialysis which requires rigorous compliance and has been found to have a higher mortality rate in rural populations; or forgoing dialysis treatment altogether.